When You Believe
by Turtle2
Summary: And now, the dramatic conclusion: Janeway vs. a planet's greatest evil (Oooh!)
1. The Earther

Disclaimer: Song and dance, yaddy yaddy yadda. Actually since paramount can probably afford to have me killed by now, I'd better do this right: Paramount is bigger than I am, richer than I am, and the owners of the geniuses that came up with ST Voyager. I completely appreciate the fact that borrowing the characters is not a right, it's a privilege.  
  
Thanks for reading. On with the show!  
  
On Rycose IV, daily life is by no means a simple task. From whatever age at which one begins to be aware of one's surroundings, one cannot help but lose a little more hope each day. There are few other options in a world torn by the wars of tyrants. But sometimes, just sometimes, things happen to remind me that there are always chances for turning things around as long as we're here, as if an angel watching over recognized the perfect time to make such a thing so.  
  
This is the story of an angel.  
  
My name is Melai of the Krischta family. My run-down is simple: I'm 26 rotations old, female, and an orphan, my parents having fought and died in the Great Wars during my infancy. At least that's what they tell me. I was raised by the training staff at the military academy of the Republic of Madditah. My classmates and I grew up to the sounds of whistles, orders, Palaish scum jokes and the pledge of both our hearts to he Republic of Madditah everyday. You see, Rycose IV is divided into three main alliances: Paland and its "protectorates", the United Primes, and the Madditan Republic-Sacco Islands. The original bad blood between the three is unknown to anybody and records vary, respective to the nationality of the historian. Some say that Paland was called by the Gods at the beginning of time to lead the entire world to greatness. Others think that the United Primes were the victims of some savage attack at the hands of everyone else and have been fighting for their lives ever since. The belief that I was brought up with, the most popular among my own countrymen was that Madditans are the only truly pure race and that the others were but by- products of evolution meant to serve us (with the Saccos ranking highest among them of coarse).  
  
I grew up believing fiercely in The Cause and setting all my goals in life to revolve around military service: I would graduate from the academy as an officer and make a name for myself on the fields of honor or die trying. My determination and honored lineage earned me the highest honors in my class nearly every rotation, my teachers respected me, my peers wanted to be me. So how, one may ask, did my career change so dramatically to the one I am now honored to carry?  
  
I vividly remember the first time I doubted myself. It was the first time I saw a man executed. I'd always thought that burning was too good for the enemy and any sympathizers, that any who resisted their destiny deserved what they got. But one day towards the beginning of my senior rotation at the academy my class was taken to the capital town square watch the process for the first time. The truly sick thing is that it happened far too often for any of the locals to be interested. People walked by, shopping and eating and visiting not ten paces from the man as the flames devoured him, my squad watching in silent formation. Just before it was initiated he looked at me - me out of the entire class. From then until there was no more of him to watch I could not look away, and for the first time a flash of something I'd never felt before, couldn't even name at first sent an uncontrollable shudder through my body. For a split second I forgot who he was, drowned in his screams. All I knew was what he was, a helpless man crying out to anyone who could hear, who had once been a small boy, and stood dying before me now for reasons I didn't even know.  
  
What wasn't changed about the way I felt that day was changed some weeks later when my squad went on our first official raiding party. I'd really rather not go into vivid detail. The hard facts are that it was a city just within the Palaish border. My squad had not a single casualty. All fatalities were people who lived there. All were non-combatants. By the hundreds we killed them all, old people, kids, young mothers trying desperately to protect each other. A short time into it all I stopped shooting and actually looked around me at what we were doing. Laying flat on my belly in ankle-deep dust among the front-liners as everyone else continued to spray energy beams at their targets, I stopped. I watched. I listened. It was dizzying: The blood and the bodies, the screams and the cries for mercy from the Gods, the people who died on the spot and those who faded slowly, knowing what was happening to them and scared to death. As I looked at them, all once as conscious and afraid of death as I, I knew that something, somewhere a long, long time ago had gone terribly wrong. It deafened me. It blinded me. It suffocated me. It sickened me. And it was all happening because of me and people like me.  
  
On the trip back to camp that night my comrades enthusiastically celebrated the victory. I spent the entire time just trying not to heave myself inside out.  
  
As soon as we returned to the regular academy training grounds my private little epiphany began showing up in my daily activities. The first incident was two days later when I realized I'd forgotten a fairly large segment of a hand-fighting drill only after I'd finished performing it for my instructor, my mind having still been trapped in the Palaish city. When ordered to do it over again I responded after a long hesitation: "I can't. I'm too sad."  
  
My instructor promptly sent a note to my barracks master, reading:  
  
"Cadet Melai of the Krischta family refuses to carry out drill protocols because she is sad.  
  
Sincerely,  
  
Cpl. So-and-so"  
  
For this I was given my first several demerits, a light introduction to the strap, and a stern lecture from the commandant himself involving a lot of things to which I paid no attention. From there my academic career began a slow, steady decline which I'm sure would have continued had it not been my senior rotation. As it was I had barely five lunar cycles with which to disappoint my instructors. I'd carry out orders grimly, and then I started hesitating. On several occasions I flat-out refused. I couldn't flog one of my classmates for laughing during a biology lecture. I wouldn't go on any raiding mission I was invited to. I didn't even watch the executions in the square with my class. I couldn't, and as time went by I became more and more sure of that.  
  
All incidents involving my turn-about behavior were kept under tight cover. I was the star of my class; people looked up to me more than most of their masters. I had to set an example. If my classmates knew what I'd been up to, the instructors feared a student uprising. Privately though, I was continuously disciplined, threatened, demereted, and all but relieved of my position as valedictorian.  
  
Finally came the night before graduation. As my friends and other bunkmates whispered late into the night about how excited they were and how the days ahead would be something of a delightful ongoing adventurous picnic, all I could think of was the man I'd watched burn to death and the dead in the "purified" Palaish city. How sick I felt that no matter what I did, I could never make up for it. all there was left to do was spend the rest of my life trying.  
  
Not long after the others finally fell asleep the night had gone - And me with it. ***  
  
All of the above-said leads me to where the story really begins which is an early morning during a bitterly cold snap of weather, four rotations later. I was off on a walk about the outskirt forest-plains. Being the scavenger that I was, I had to go out at an absurdly early time of day and then traipse about until well after mid-day in order to find enough wood and foodstuffs to stay alive. It was absolutely charming, if the reader would please forgive the sarcasm. Although, there was one thing I did like about the cold times: I could walk around in broad daylight without fear. Even in the outskirts where I'd taken up permanent refuge there would periodically be a stray farmer poking around for extra seeds. My picture having been on wanted posters for eight consecutive rotations, I couldn't exactly let myself be seen. But in the cold they were all snuggled into their smoking little cabins along with everyone else on the inside of the law.  
  
The snow was knee-deep that day and the trees naked of protecting leaves. It was mostly dark still, the only light coming from the smaller of the moons at one far end of the sky and a hint of red glowing from the suns at the other.  
  
Red. At first I thought it was only the sunlight reflecting on the snow. Of coarse I was fooling myself. Sunlight would not be so dark red, nor leave such a neat dribbling trail in the snow. I found it near the edge of the forest about ten paces into the adjacent plain. When I saw it at my feet I stopped in my tracks, looking to my left to where it stretched towards civilization as far as I could see, then to my right where it stretched towards nowhere as far as I could see. I stood there puzzling, my feet freezing in the snow and my nose hairs turning stiff. Perhaps a leaky bucket of red berries. Yeah right, at this time of rotation? Maybe a hurt animal. I'd heard of some rare species that had blood that dark. only none of them walked on two legs and the footprints on either side of the trail were unmistakable.  
  
I chewed my lip, wondering what to do, then came to the same conclusion I had for the previous four rotations: Why not? One may wonder how I'd managed to survive so long with such an attitude as well as a bounty on my head, but let's face it: In such situations as mine, good decision-making has far less to do with anything than good or bad luck. Therefor one has little to do but follow her hearts, and consequently the trail.  
  
Following the trail would not take long, I knew. It was headed for the foothills across one of the biggest plains in the outskirts, which in itself would slow a traveler down, not to mention the fact that the cold times in the Madditan forest-plains are harsh. No one could make it very far out there on foot. As I walked toward the foothills the tracks would stagger more and the trail be brighter red until it abruptly ended at a snowdrift where there shouldn't be one, right in the middle of the plain.  
  
Kneeling next to the drift, I plunged my hand down into it and instantly met with fabric of some kind. Pulling my hand back out I found the palm coated in bright red, sticky fluid. Intrigued, I began to clear away the snow - An arm covered in black fabric, a shoulder in red.  
  
I nearly dove backwards.  
  
"Gods above." I breathed out loud.  
  
The face I found was not Madditan, not even Rycosian. Though nearly all of the features were very similar to those of my world's people, missing were the blue-green patches of tough skin that we have extending from the outer corners of our eyes across each temple to the hairline, protecting the delicate network of neural capillaries beneath. An off- worlder. If the Builders found it.  
  
Then I saw that this one had been found. It had a terrible energy wound in the left flank that could only be made by military weapons.  
  
So. An off-worlder and a fugitive (of coarse, the two sort of go hand- in-hand around here). That it was alive however barely was obvious. That it would not survive much longer was clear. There it was: My chance to do something right for a change. The only problem was that there are fates far worse than death in the Republic of Madditah, one of which would certainly be devised for me if I were caught meddling in such an affair. But just as I was considering that I happened to look down at the off-worlder, a woman I realized. I swear, I swear by all the gods and my mother's name, in her I slowly began to see the face of every young mother, every child, every old man in the Palaish city. Like a fist in my face, seeing her there in the snow showed me all the people I'd ever hurt.  
  
All right. A new experience.  
  
Well, that did it. Besides, I'd always wondered what it would be like, doing things because I thought they were the right thing to do as opposed to picking somebody else's nose if a superior told me to. It all led to me removing my cloak, wrapping the off-worlder in it, and then beginning one of the better feats of strength of my life. Contrary to the popular belief among Rycosians (Madditans in particular), I can say after having met a few off-worlders that we are by no means a species gifted in physical strength. Indeed, in comparison to some others I know I find I can barely call us adequate in that department. The only way I made it back to my hovel was to sling the off-worlder across my shoulders and then grit my teeth as I felt myself grow shorter under the extra weight with every step.  
  
When I finally made it back I slammed the door shut with a foot, all but dropped the off-worlder on the floor, and took a good minute or two just trying to stand up straight without paralyzing myself. Once I worked my warped spine into a climactic deafening crack I began the agonizing task of trying to treat the off-worlder without killing her.  
  
"Gods and ancestors above, I swear if you'll just help me get this right I'll heed any sign you give that I should turn myself in," I prayed.  
  
The wound was bad, a gaping, oozing and messy deep hole in the ribs. I remembered fragments of my basic first aid course, but what can you do for someone about whose physiology you know nothing? After you're done panicking, you get the frozen clothes off and go from there. Lucky for her she was wearing layers: A black jacket with red shoulders, a blue-gray turtleneck underneath, and then a chemise of the same color. The bizarre garment that was the final layer I left in place, unsure of what would happen if I removed it. Moving right along, I swabbed the area of the wound clean of dry blood, then packed it tight with my only spare bed-sheet to be held in place with strips of my only spare curtain. Having done the best I could with that I took her to my "bed" which was really just a thick mat on the floor, turned to the meager heat source in the stove and built it up as high as it would go. I turned back to my guest, rubbing my hands together briskly.  
  
As I worked her circulation I noticed two things: She was beginning to shiver which I assumed was good, and she seemed to have only one distinct heartbeat which was either catastrophic or indicative of a foreign anatomical trait. Unfortunately, all I could do was hope for the latter. Finally I slipped her into a loose set of trousers and shirt, bundled her in quilts, and waited. And waited.  
  
For the rest of that day and well into the night I watched over her, thinking until my brains hurt. There are precious few things of which I am sure. I usually reserve spaces in that category for the simple things that get me through the day: Keep your neck tucked in, never gamble with a Madditan junior officer, watch your back but love your front, things I depended on that never let me down. Any sort of person was certainly out of the question. But to look at the off-worlder, as she lay there trapped in sleep, though we hadn't officially met, hadn't even spoken. I don't know. Odd, eh?  
  
The middle of the first night presented another problem. She began to sweat, breathe in wheezing little gasps, and toss her head from side to side in the beginnings of delirium while constantly muttering things I didn't understand, something about 'Chakotay' and 'Tuvok' and 'Chakotay' again and 'B'Elanna'. and 'Chakotay'.  
  
Fever, I surmised. There must be an infection setting in. Whoopie.  
  
Dawnish the next morning was when we actually met. She was lying quietly, I mopping her sweaty face with a damp cloth. When she turned her face toward me I assumed she'd just turn it away again like she'd been doing periodically until then. Imagine my surprise when I found her slowly opening her eyes.  
  
She stared at me for a bit without seeing me. She drew her brows together and blinked as though attempting to focus her vision. When she finally seemed to make out my image the moment was punctuated by her long, drawn-out sigh.  
  
Not for the first time in my life I found myself not knowing what to say. I knew though that it had to be done, so I cleared my throat and took a breath.  
  
"Morning," I managed.  
  
".You're Rycosian," she said in a husky whisper.  
  
I emitted a self-deprecating giggle.  
  
"You're not."  
  
"Then. I am your prisoner."  
  
My jaw dropped and hung for a moment.  
  
"I. What?"  
  
Perhaps a little more slowly than necessary, it dawned on me: Of coarse she thought I was an enemy, she being in a somewhat delirious state and her entire knowledge of my culture based on a lot of unpleasant dealings with military authorities. I knew enough to deduce that treatment of an off-worlder would be relatively the same anywhere on Rycose IV. I couldn't have blamed her for knocking me into the next rotation if she'd had the strength.  
  
"No! No, I mean - I mean I'm Rycosian, yeah, but not like the others. I-I." I paused to organize my thoughts. Rambling would not be helpful. "Please forgive me, I just never. I'm just a little nervous I guess. Look, um, I just wanted to help. Your wound is deep, I just thought."  
  
At that she began in utter futility to try to sit up. I gently set my hands on her shoulders and held her down.  
  
"Please don't, it's too soon!"  
  
She closed her eyes and knit her brows as though trying to remember. When she looked at me again, her face was less rigid, more bewildered.  
  
"Who are you?"  
  
"My name's Melai of the Krischta family. What's yours?"  
  
"It's. Janeway. Captain Kathryn Janeway. starship Voyager."  
  
"I noticed that it was taking more effort for her to speak with some alarm, but decided it best to continue the conversation nevertheless.  
  
"Janeway. You're an off-worlder."  
  
". Earth."  
  
"Earth? I haven't heard of it."  
  
". Far. Very far."  
  
There was another painful pause.  
  
"But yeah, you can go any time you want. I just think that would be a really, really bad idea."  
  
Smooth, Melai. Gratefully I noticed that she had passed out again and therefor I would not have to think of anything else to say. Gods, a hermit can get nervous.  
  
For another day I watched her grow weaker and weaker. She panted like a dying animal, her skin growing hot and her nightmares more vivid. Her bleeding persistently seeped through the bandages and every time I changed them, I saw the area more red and inflamed than the last, not to mention the fact that Janeway the Earther in her delusional state seemed to think I was trying to kill her with every touch. Worse was when she just seemed to start shutting down, not responsive to anything, just laying there dying.  
  
As I looked on I weighed my options, knowing that in the end there were only two: I could get her some medicine for the infection or she would die. Before you think less of me let me explain that it's not nearly as simple as it sounds. Medicine, like everything else in the Republic of Madditah is kept under the restrictions of the police state and the Builders. The products stay under armed guard from the time they're processed in the factory until they are sold to the consumer with the proper papers and identification. The Builder Shura knew that people needed medicine. We wouldn't dare risk the right to get it for our families or ourselves with a bad mark on our record. So of coarse if I were to try to get medicine on my own, I'd be shot by the end of it.  
  
The lesser of two evils, that was the best I could do. In the end, I'm confidant that that's what I got.  
  
In the smoke-filled, hazy, dark liquor barrel known only as The Tavern, I barely spotted my old acquaintance seated at a secluded booth tucked in a corner. The place was set in a valley outside the city, halfway between town and the outskirts. It was the only social gathering establishment available to the farmers in the outskirts, all three of them. Of coarse I exaggerate, the place actually did very decent business, spirits being in high demand on Rycose IV as many people's only escape from the constant loss of loved ones and obscene taxes for war funding. The place was hopping that night. A lively 3-man band up on the stage by the bar had everybody else loudly laughing and drinking and dancing.  
  
Good. If they couldn't hear themselves think, they couldn't hear us whisper.  
  
He was older, sporting a day's growth of stubble and an officer's uniform replaced the one he'd worn as a cadet. But it was definitely him, his trim bulky frame, his eyes when he'd been drinking. Lexei didn't take his half-closed eyes from his mug until I'd made my way across the room and slid into the seat opposite him, at which point he met my eyes cautiously.  
  
"So. You're still hanging around somewhere, Melai? You don't tap, don't even wire me until tonight. Thought you'd be in gladiator school by now," he said, not bothering to hide the edge of bitterness in his tone. "What's it been now?"  
  
I took a moment to calculate the time since our class's graduation from the academy, the last time I'd seen him.  
  
"Four rotations," I concluded.  
  
He looked me over quietly, then arched an eyebrow.  
  
"Time's been good to you."  
  
The civil remark made me uneasy. In the academy, I'd known Lexei as a light-hearted cad who could make you laugh during a funeral. All through our training I'd considered him my best friend, delightful to be around and always there if I needed a shoulder. Then I began to learn the truth about the leadership of the Builders and Shura, Lexei refused to believe it, and I left without saying good-bye.  
  
"Thanks," I responded, "You look the same."  
  
Thankfully he flashed a hint of his old crooked smile as he glanced down at his infantry officer's uniform.  
  
"It suits me. Suits a lot of us."  
  
"You being looked after?"  
  
He nodded. "The corps takes care of you, Melai. You knew that." Another gulp of spirits. "What about you? Looking a bit thin there."  
  
"You don't keep extra weight in my place, but I get by. I can still kick your buttocks from here to there like a ten-legged razor beast."  
  
That forced a short laugh through his nose. We'd always been well- matched friendly sparring rivals.  
  
Lexei finished the drink, then set his forearms on the table and looked at me expectantly. After all, it had been I that wired him in the middle of the night and requested the rendezvous. Now he wanted to know why. I took a breath and then my shot.  
  
"Lexei, I need a favor."  
  
"Whatever it is I won't do it. They burn deserters and anyone who helps them. New clause."  
  
"I know, I know. You know I don't usually do this. I wouldn't if I didn't think we could get away with it, I certainly wouldn't if it wasn't important."  
  
For a moment, genuine concern crossed his face.  
  
"You in some kind of trouble, Melai?"  
  
I gave a short, trembling exhale.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Well? What do you need from me?"  
  
"Medicine. Antibiotics, I think."  
  
"So steal it."  
  
"I don't think they have what I need laying around."  
  
"So kidnap a doctor."  
  
"That's not funny," I informed him.  
  
"Look, Melai, you asked me to come. I came and if my superiors find out, I'm ash. You abandoned everything you believed in and everyone who ever cared about you and now you want my help. What were you expecting, a welcome home?"  
  
I held up a hand to interrupt.  
  
"It's not for me."  
  
Lexei frowned.  
  
"What?"  
  
I leaned forward over the table between us and whispered.  
  
"I found someone, a woman, unconscious in the snow with a bad wound. She hasn't been able to tell me much yet but I think she was running from Shura's guard."  
  
Lexei sat back in shock.  
  
"Gods above."  
  
"It gets worse."  
  
I watched his brows arch and eyes widen, knowing that I was not scoring any points with him.  
  
"Worse?"  
  
"She's an off-worlder. Just one heart."  
  
There was a pause during which Lexei blinked at me in disbelief, his mouth slightly agape.  
  
"I'm doing what I can for her but infection from the wound is spreading and she's in poor condition. I need something to give her and I'll never make it through the proper channels. I just thought -"  
  
"Am I drunk already, or did a word resembling thought escape you? No, Melai! You did not think if you had the idea that I'd ever help you aid a government fugitive! This is treason and I am a soldier. If you have one iota of anything like honor left, you'll disappear and never risk anyone this way again."  
  
I clenched my jaw.  
  
"What I thought was that you'd retained some trace of decency. You may have given up thinking for yourself and I can't really blame you. It's a lot easier, things being the way they are and certainly less dangerous. But Lexei, I know that the Earther does not deserve to die. Nobody does that way."  
  
Realizing I was explaining myself to him, I bit my tongue and stood up.  
  
"You won't hear from me again."  
  
I got one stride before Lexei's big hand caught my arm, held me for a moment, and then gently urged me back into my seat. I hesitated, then complied and when he looked at me again he'd dropped the iciness.  
  
"I don't understand," he confessed. "You had what any of us dreamed of and you let it go like trash. I. I don't understand!"  
  
I looked down at the table as I set my palm over his hand.  
  
"I saw them kill a kid. They blew his head off because they wanted to. If that's not a reason I don't know what is. I know I can't salvage everyone, but I saw the Earther lying in the snow and I thought if I could save just one."  
  
My voice trailed off as the words began to stick in my throat. It was a second or two before Lexei could put together his response.  
  
"You know they were under orders."  
  
"Yeah sure, Lexei. So were the ones who burned the house of some farmers in the east plain, slaughtered their animals and left them to starve. So are the ones who massacre entire cities -"  
  
"Enemy cities."  
  
"But cities, full of non-combatants. For Gods' sakes Lexei, you see it every day! The list of atrocities the corps's done under orders from the Builders and Shura goes on and on."  
  
"You don't know that."  
  
"I do."  
  
We stared each other down until he looked away. What seemed like hours later he dug into a pocket, pulled something out, and slowly fiddled with it as he spoke.  
  
"I need you to understand one thing: I'm not agreeing with you, forgiving you, or verifying anything. As far as I'm concerned, you're just a crazy little hermit with far too much time, but a harmless one. Keep that in mind."  
  
"He kept the object carefully hidden in his hand as he reached across the table and put it in mine. I found it to be a little green glass bottle stopped with a cork.  
  
"I've never known of a race that didn't respond will to that. It should keep the Earther alive until you think of something. Best I can do."  
  
I looked at him sincerely.  
  
"Thank you."  
  
I got up to leave and once again I felt Lexei catch my arm. Looking down at him, I saw the gentle face I'd left behind.  
  
". Watch your back, okay?"  
  
I smiled, feeling the beginnings of the sting of tears.  
  
"Yeah. You too."  
  
By the time I made it back to my place, the moons had begun their descent. I found Janeway the Earther where I'd left her, practically comatose and suffocating with fever. After building the fire back up I knelt next to the mat and began my work. As I slowly peeled the bandages away from the oozing wound I heard a series of low weak moans from her, painful just to listen to. Wound exposed, I slowly reached over to touch the red, puffy skin around the gash as gently as I could in order to feel the temperature. No sooner had my fingers brushed their destination than the Earther gave a sharp gasp as the aggravation of the inflamed area nearly forced her awake. Looking at her sweating, helpless face, all I could do was swallow.  
  
"Forgive me."  
  
I uncorked Lexei's little bottle and poured half its contents into the wound. In an effort to ignore the delirious agonized cries that filled the room as I gently massaged the medicine into usefulness, I soon found myself singing. The song was one I'd grown up knowing and remembered long after my peers had forgotten it, slow and in a gently minor key that was always the first song to pop into my head whenever I asked my memory for one.  
  
"The nights are cold, and I am warm  
I am safe in any storm  
When it gets dark, there will always be  
An angel to watch over me."  
  
The song went on. Janeway's pained sounds gradually turned to moans and then ragged breathing. By the time the song was over she panted as though she'd carried something twice her size up four flights of stairs, but she seemed to be getting control of the pain. I bandaged her up again and began to pat her face in an effort to wake her.  
  
"Come on, I need you to wake up. Hey. I know it's thirsty work but it'll only take a twitch."  
  
I watched her respond by weakly lolling her head to one side while she drew just enough strength from somewhere or other to open her eyes part way. I smiled.  
  
"There she is. Please forgive me if this tastes funny."  
  
With my arm slid under her shoulders I lifted her into a fractional sitting position and got her to sip down the remainder of the medicine.  
  
"Well done."  
  
I let her down again. As I pulled the quilt up over her I noticed her looking at me.  
  
"I'm very sorry I had to wake you. Please, go back to sleep. The medicine will work better."  
  
She took a deep, slow breath as if gathering energy for a great task, which turned out to be sliding her hand up across her body to cover mine as it rested on her shoulder.  
  
"Th-thank."  
  
Exhausted, she was asleep before she could finish.  
  
It was the sound of her moving that woke me. I'd fallen asleep on the round rug next to the mat, thanks to the fact of which my startled first movement caused some sickeningly loud pops in my neck and back. Gruffly massaging the sore areas, I saw the Earther blinking up at me, significantly less pale, significantly less sweaty, and breathing significantly easier. She was actually a very handsome woman when she wasn't dying, auburn hair not quite so plastered to her face. Discomfort forgotten, I smiled at her in relief.  
  
"Gods. It worked."  
  
Not wasting time or energy on a response, she groped a hand until she found my jerkin front and pulled me forward with surprising force.  
  
"Where are we?"  
  
"Um. My house?"  
  
She shifted her gaze away from me and about the room until some sudden realization reached her and she summoned her strength to roll toward the edge of the mat in an effort to get up.  
  
"They're looking for me. They'll kill you, I have to go."  
  
"I know, I know. It's all right. If they kill me it won't be because of you," I tried to tell her as I gently urged her back down.  
  
"You don't understand - Aigh!"  
  
The pain from the wound hit her and her face contorted as the rest of her went slack.  
  
"What? What is it?" I asked desperately.  
  
"Please," she said through her teeth, "I need to contact my ship."  
  
"Oh, my. I'm afraid I don't have that sort of equipment."  
  
"No," she emphasized, "My jacket. There's a pin, silver, gold, triangle in a circle, pin."  
  
I immediately obliged, crossing the room to where I had her clothes neatly stacked and folded. The jacket I found had four tiny round metal pins on the collar but none like the one she described.  
  
"I'm sorry, but are you sure you brought it with you?"  
  
"Oh, no. They must've taken it."  
  
"I'm. really sorry! Is there someplace I should look for it?" I said frantically.  
  
"How'd I get here?"  
  
"I think you walked. I found you in the middle of a field about a kilometer off and carried you from there."  
  
At her astonished look I was concerned.  
  
"Oh, Gods. I-I didn't hurt you, did I?"  
  
"No! I'm sorry, you're very kind. But I have to go, it's very important that I contact my ship."  
  
She started sitting up again through an obvious wall of pain and dizziness, which was starting to irritate me. After all, I'd hardly think it polite to make life more difficult for someone trying to save your life. All I could do was gently hold her down.  
  
"Stop doing that! You're hurt. I'm not a healer and it was enough of an ulcer trying to keep you alive the first time."  
  
Finally she relaxed and lay back, panting from the effort.  
  
"Look," I said. "It's a fair distance to civilization from here. There's nothing between them and us but one little tavern and a great deal of snow. In this cold you'll never make it. Besides, nobody'll find you here, I'm sure of it. They haven't found me and they've been looking for four whole rotations."  
  
"It's not that. They still have my crewmembers."  
  
I lifted an eyebrow.  
  
"There are more of you? Gods, the Builders must be having a fit."  
  
"Builders? Who are the Builders?"  
  
"I'm sorry, I - The base Madditan government. I'd assumed they were the ones that shot you. They don't like foreigners, especially ones as foreign as you."  
  
"They never told us who they were." She closed her eyes, trying to remember. "We came down to trade. they ambushed us the second we materialized. I. I got away, I meant to draw their fire-"  
  
She was interrupted by a fit of coughing. I rushed to get her some water and then lifted her shoulders enough for her to drink from the cup I held.  
  
"Thank you," she said quietly when she was finished, "And I don't just mean for the water. I know it can't be helping you to associate with a government fugitive."  
  
I chewed my lip again.  
  
"May I ask you something?" I began the nagging question.  
  
"Of coarse."  
  
"This may sound a little silly, but do you have just one heart?"  
  
That forced a little smile at my timidity onto her.  
  
"Only one."  
  
"Oh, good! I was afraid your other one'd stopped."  
  
Janeway the Earther's look turned serious.  
  
"How long?"  
  
"Two days and two nights. I know you lost a lot of blood. When I ran into you, you were frozen blue. Then you had a bad fever. I got you some medicine but I don't know how long it'll last -"  
  
"Two days!" she gasped, "I. I have to find them."  
  
I saw the signs that she was drifting out again. Thank the Gods.  
  
"Shhhhh."  
  
". I have to. find them."  
  
"Hush. I'll answer all your questions when you've slept."  
  
Fighting it to the end, she gave out and her eyes closed, leaving me shaking my head to clear it.  
  
Wow, I thought, nervously scratching my scalp. I didn't know good deeds could get me into this much trouble!  
  
"Have you been watching over me all this time?"  
  
The Earther's voice shook me out of the doze I'd fallen into. Startled, I looked towards the window and found twilight. Janeway I saw looking up at me, seeming much healthier.  
  
"I'm sorry," I stammered. "It's a habit, I guess. I'm always afraid my, er, projects won't turn out well if I don't keep an eye on them."  
  
"Please, don't apologize. I appreciate your trouble."  
  
I smiled sheepishly. The Earther seemed strange, but strange in the nicest of ways. Everyone knew that any off-worlder they could ever meet would be inherently, well, upsetting to the natural order of things to say the least. There was something about this one. Her husky voice had a certain enchanting quality, her eyes a thoughtfulness I rarely saw so easily. And since she'd come to, all she'd spoken of was her missing comrades without the slightest interest in herself. I didn't understand. but I liked it.  
  
"How are you?"  
  
She thought for a moment, probably taking a sort of inventory of her body.  
  
"Better," She concluded. "Much stronger."  
  
With that she pushed herself slowly into a sitting position.  
  
"Are you hungry?" I handed her a bowl without waiting for an answer. "Scavenger stew. The best of what I can scrounge up."  
  
"Thank you." She began to eat hungrily, speaking between mouthfuls. "Tell me, have you heard anything concerning a group of aliens arrested by authorities?"  
  
I had to smile inwardly at that. Any other time the question would've been ludicrous.  
  
"I don't get a lot of news, I'm afraid."  
  
"I see. Would you have any idea where they'd be kept?"  
  
"Well, it's been. a long time, but I assume the central compound is still there."  
  
"Do you know how far?"  
  
I shrugged. "A half day's walk in this weather. More if the wind picks up."  
  
"Dammit." She cocked her head in curiosity. "You're here alone?"  
  
"That's right."  
  
She paused in her eating to look at me. I felt her eyes examining my floppy brown hair, my baggy tan clothes, my suddenly self-conscious face.  
  
"You seem. young."  
  
"I'm an orphan."  
  
"Oh, I'm sorry."  
  
Another new experience.  
  
"Well, why?"  
  
"Forgive me. In my culture it's very difficult to grow up alone."  
  
"Well, here too, but why should you be sorry? It can't be your fault."  
  
She smiled gently.  
  
"I was expressing sympathy."  
  
"Oh! I mean, thank you. Please, don't be concerned, though. I was raised decently, really."  
  
"I'm sure you were," she said with no hint of sarcasm.  
  
"Your name is Janeway, yes? May I ask, well, what are you?"  
  
"I'm from a race called 'human'. We originate from a planet called Earth, many light years away in the Alpha quadrant."  
  
"Al-pha? I'm sorry, I don't know much about space."  
  
She paused in thought.  
  
"Can you imagine something that moves so fast that it can make its way around your planet ten times in a second?"  
  
"I've. never thought about it, but all right."  
  
"It would take such a thing seventy of your rotations to get to Earth."  
  
My shoulders fell. I'd never thought about such a thing!  
  
"Oh, my. But how did you get here?"  
  
"It's a bit of a story, I'm afraid."  
  
"Oh, that's all right. There's not much else to do around here anyway."  
  
I settled in for her tale of a great ship called Voyager from far away, stolen from where it belongs by a force she'd been forced to destroy in order to save an entire race of people from annihilation. Now, united with the very people she'd been sent to apprehend in the first place, all she wanted was to get them all home.  
  
"Wait a minute," I interrupted when she seemed to be finished. "You could've gone home but you gave up the chance for a race of people you didn't even know?"  
  
She shrugged. "It seemed like the right thing to do at the time."  
  
"I'm sorry, it's just that. such things are not widely practiced on Rycose IV."  
  
She knit her eyebrows.  
  
"Really? And what would you call this?"  
  
Another new experience.  
  
"Hm. Touché`."  
  
"May I ask you about yourself?"  
  
My ears were suddenly on fire. If she knew what I used to be, how could she trust me enough to help her? If I couldn't help, there was no telling what would happen -  
  
"I've made you uncomfortable," she said apologetically.  
  
"It's not you, honestly. I just. There are just some things, awfully big things actually. You. can't know about me without knowing those things. I don't want you to have nowhere to go because you didn't trust me."  
  
"Who says I trusted you to begin with?"  
  
I chuckled at her dead pan humor. Suddenly I wanted to tell her. I wanted to tell her everything, no matter how grim. I wanted someone to finally know what I'd done, why I'd done it, what was really going on. I wanted it with both my hearts.  
  
I told her everything, from my upbringing at the academy to the preceding night. I forced myself to speak slowly despite the sudden, pressing need to purge myself of the long-held secret. As she listened, her face remained mostly neutral except for the subtlest of changes that let me know she was intently listening the entire time.  
  
"What happens if they find you?" she asked when I'd finished.  
  
"Then I will be. dealt with. I am a deserter, you know. A coward. To the Builders there's no greater crime. They can't outlaw me until they find me, though. It keeps up the theory that we are free to speak in our own defense. Until then I'm just missing."  
  
"It must've been difficult for you, leaving your friends behind."  
  
I shrugged.  
  
"I suppose it was. I didn't know what else to do."  
  
I was about to pry some more when I was interrupted by the crash of a brick sailing through my window. I instinctively ducked and covered. Janeway immediately shielded me from the flying glass by ensnaring me in a safe embrace.  
  
Out of the following silence rose a distant maniacal chuckle that led both of us to look up cautiously.  
  
"Stay here."  
  
I made my way slowly to the door and eased it open with a long whine of the hinges. Sticking my head outside I saw only the snowy landscape. I frowned and took a bold step out into my 'yard'.  
  
I saw stars before I saw the two men concealing themselves on either side of my door. I fell back into the snow, dazed from the direct hook to my face and watched them focus from four to two as they stood over me, grinning to expose what was perhaps eleven teeth between them. One was tall and gangly, but broad-shouldered. The other was only slightly taller than I, bug-eyed, and exceedingly hairy. Both were dressed in ragged black and smelled of things passed by sick old men.  
  
Vulture bandits. Seven hells, not now!  
  
"What do you want?" I growled through the blood from my split lip.  
  
"Same as anybody! We want one hot night at this cold time," the tall one said.  
  
"Come, little one," said Bug-eyes as he grabbed my collar and hauled me to my feet, "We'll leave you alone and all we ask in return is your money. If you have no money, then spirits. No spirits, then food. No food, then clothes. No clothes." he lifted a hand to my hip, ". then virtue."  
  
I slapped his hand away. He jumped back, feigning insult.  
  
"Why, I don't believe she's going to let us in!"  
  
"Come, let's see what she's got in there."  
  
Before thinking beyond the fact that I had a bona fide off-worlder stashed in my house, I dove at the tall one and tackled him to the ground. Before he could recover, I threw a straight punch to the other's nose. From there I called on the hand-fighting skills I'd learned at the academy, rusty perhaps but so long practiced I think they'll be tattooed into my long-term memory until I'm at least a hundred rotations old. Even so, I feel compelled to point out that contrary to storybook portrayals of the subject, hand fighting is hardly ever composed of a series of well-placed blows that take one party down with little time or effort on the other's part. It actually consists of a great deal of choking and biting and scratching and strangling and shoving and squeezing and gouging and hair- pulling and grabbing and pushing and rolling about on the ground and it isn't long at all before everybody involved just wants to quit and shake hands anyway. Unfortunately, such an ending is not likelihood when two desperate criminals are trying to break your neck.  
  
I would like to say for the record that I was kicking their asses despite the crudeness of it all until Bug-eyes pulled a disrupter pistol from the folds of his shirt and aimed it squarely between my eyes, causing me to freeze mid-kick. We stood panting at each other as I felt my face harden in fury.  
  
"Now," Bug-eyes rasped, glaring at me through the eye not rapidly swelling shut, "I thought you looked a little smarter than that!"  
  
The other man shoved me roughly to my knees. I grit my teeth, waiting for the last strike.  
  
"Why don't you try that on someone who can fight back?"  
  
Janeway. I shot to my feet and found the bandits staring at her behind them, their mouths agape. Her eyes were cold, her mouth in a thin, tight line, her jaw clenched in anger. In her hand was a disrupter pistol, trained carefully on Bug-eyes.  
  
"Drop it," she ordered.  
  
Bug-eyes scowled in defeat as he tossed his weapon in the snow at my feet.  
  
"Get out. If you come back I'll shoot before I'm even sure it's you. Now!"  
  
Reluctant to admit defeat, they hesitated. But when she fired a warning shot that melted the snow deadly close to Bug-eyes' feet they took off like birds at a gunshot.  
  
Sure they were out of earshot, Janeway dropped the appearance and doubled over.  
  
Safely back inside having helped Janeway the Earther back to my bed, I wiped pain-induced sweat from her face.  
  
"Where did you get the gun?" I asked, still amazed.  
  
"I stole it from the taller one when he wasn't looking. Here."  
  
She took the cloth from me and began to dab at my cut lip.  
  
"Seventh hell. If they say anything -!"  
  
"They're bandits. If they have any sense they won't get within a hundred meters of the law. Relax."  
  
Her gentle touch surprised me; A minute ago everything about her seemed downright murderous. Another new experience. Of course also was the fact that she could've just gotten killed trying to save my life.  
  
Hesitantly, I raised a hand to her bare temple. She relaxed as I probed in curiosity, amazed to actually find a pulse there.  
  
"Are all hu-mans like you?"  
  
"In this respect," she chuckled.  
  
"Actually what I meant was. everyone knows that off-worlders are, well, evil. They upset everyone's destiny."  
  
Janeway cocked her head curiously.  
  
"I see. And do you think that I am evil?"  
  
"No!" I said, seizing her hand in both of mine, "No, you are kind and good and -"  
  
"And an off-worlder." She smiled gently. "Now you tell me: Are all Rycosians like you?"  
  
"No, most of them wouldn't be caught dead having this conversation."  
  
"No, not all humans are like me. There are a great many humans I'd rather not spend the day with. But if there is anything one mustn't do, it is generalize humans."  
  
"And. if there's anything else, it's generalize Rycosians."  
  
Janeway smiled and gave my shoulder a friendly squeeze.  
  
"Have you ever considered the fact that you probably aren't alone?"  
  
"How do you mean?"  
  
"Melai, I can see that you're a special kid, but do you really think you're the only one on Rycose IV who prefers peace to war?"  
  
"Well." I considered with the most hesitation I could get away with, ". no."  
  
"Melai -"  
  
"It's so far-fetched, that's all. I've never heard of anyone who even remembers what peace is like. We don't know anything but what we've been doing since the alliances united. If there were somebody who agreed with me, they'd never move as I have. Too afraid of the Builders. I know that now."  
  
"You're that sure?"  
  
"I'm old enough to know what's going on: The Builder Shura's afraid of us. He's so afraid we'll figure out that 'The Cause' won by death is not worth having, in which case he'd be suddenly more obsolete than a wooden club in a gun fight. As long as the wars go on, the Builders have what they want. They'd do anything to keep the old ideas alive. The ones in the way, the ones like me are the ones they can't abide the thought of. If any two of us find each other. I can't say I haven't dreamed about the possibilities. The only problem is, well, let's just say mobs are easy to assemble. I couldn't ask anybody to take that kind of risk."  
  
"Who is Shura?"  
  
"Oh, he's the leader of Madditah, has been since before I was born. He took the Sacco islands as a younger man and rose up from there, or at least that's what the Builders tell us. No one ever sees him but everyone worships him like one of the Gods. They're convinced he's the one the ancient texts keep talking about, the one to lead us all to greatness."  
  
"What about you? Why aren't you afraid?"  
  
By that I was taken aback. I'd never thought comparing myself to anyone was worthwhile, being that I knew I was too weird to possibly have any characteristic vaguely comparable to that of others. However, when in doubt I usually tell the truth.  
  
"I. I am afraid. but less and less as I get less to lose," I finally said. "Besides which, I don't think I could hurt a person just because another told me to, no matter how far above me he is. It's just not my way."  
  
"And they call you 'coward'?" Janeway said, smiling crookedly.  
  
I shook my head in wonder.  
  
"Your heart is wonderful. If only the others could see."  
  
"It seems all I've done is gotten you deeper into trouble."  
  
"You don't know the half of it. I always knew this would happen, I just didn't think it would be so soon." I sighed. "What you don't know is that I am a coward. I don't even know how many opportunities I had to do something and didn't."  
  
"I think there's a difference between being a coward and being unsure."  
  
"Maybe. It's just that I can't help thinking for some reason that this is my last chance."  
  
Some time later.  
  
"You promise me you'll say it the second you think you're not up to this?"  
  
"For the last time, yes."  
  
I scowled as we walked along the road to town early the next morning at the brisk pace Janeway set. The medicine was working far too well for my liking. I had not been able to keep Janeway in bed despite my assertions that the effects were temporary and traipsing around in the snow would not help matters. I probably could've told her that she'd spontaneously combust if she didn't stay put and she wouldn't have cared, pulling on her boots and a gray stocking cap to hide her heritage and leaving me to throw up my hands in frustration. I had to admit over the three hours we'd been walking she'd done well though, matching me step for step as we crunched rhythmically in the snow left behind when the road was cleared.  
  
"How much farther is it to the compound?" Janeway asked for the eighth time.  
  
"Too far," I retorted, unable to feel myself from the hips down.  
  
"You can still go back, you know."  
  
"Oh, really? And what happens if you relapse on your little mission today? Then you and your people - what was it, four of them? - will surely die. If I come along then we will all probably die but not certainly, so you do the math."  
  
"Your powers of logic astound me," she teased.  
  
"Come on, two people are almost always less suspicious than one."  
  
"Exactly. And that's just what we've got, so why are you complaining?"  
  
Damn. She got me with her Starfleet mumbo-jumbo. Besides, I knew I'd brought this on myself. I'd made it quite clear when I realized I couldn't dissuade her from her mission that she wasn't going after her comrades alone despite her earnest protests, and if not me then who?  
  
We had no great plan, I assumed Janeway would think of one once she'd gotten as many details of the situation under her belt as she could. All I knew was how important it was not to be seen which I asserted as often as I could for the rest of the trip and Janeway scored more points for her personality by not strangling me over it. Soon the road brought us to the farms outside the city and past them to the trade villages where we could see the tall buildings of the city in the distance through the thick fog. As we passed by I noted with little surprise that I hadn't missed much in the last four rotations. I saw not a single smiling face as the people went about their business like drones, not even mindful of their feet freezing in the frost or the wind cutting through their thin clothes. Their small homes were crumbling, their wells collapsing, and their silos nearly empty. Kids looked up at us as we passed by with round, hungry eyes until their parents gently reminded them to keep their eyes down. It was the picture kept hidden from the others and me during our academy days. I knew that this was by no means the only village to feel the pinch.  
  
"What happened to these people? An attack?"  
  
I almost wished that were true. It would somehow be easier to accept than the fact that the Builders were actually taxing them to death.  
  
"War is expensive," I responded quietly.  
  
Like a mockery of it all, the side of the road was pickered fore to aft with evenly spaced viva Madditah signs, sporting such slogans as The Builders Love You and Know Your Destiny and other things that put the 'mental' in 'govern-mental'. Gods, I hated it. I hated it more than I'd ever hated the people I once thought were my enemies.  
  
Of coarse inside the city was different. The rich people lived there, the Builders and highest-ranking military professionals and weapons brokers with perhaps a scattering of life insurance salesmen, the happy people who lived off of the way things were, the ones who surrounded me growing up.  
  
"Hmm?" I said when I realized Janeway had spoken to me.  
  
"I was just saying how uniquely matched the different aspects of your culture are," she said as she gazed around at the city about the brick street that led to the square. "Your level of weapons technology is comparable to that of the twenty-second century on earth whereas the living conditions are much closer to the feudal period."  
  
"I-I wouldn't know," I stammered, distracted by the need to look around nervously, just waiting to be discovered, "That's the compound on the other side of the square. Oh, Gods!"  
  
My hearts fell into my boots when my eyes happened to fall on a nearby tavern door where I found a faded poster with my senior picture splashed across it and the words MISSING: REWARD as a caption.  
  
"What's the matter?"  
  
I nodded in the direction of the poster and she narrowed her gaze at it until she found what I was looking at.  
  
"Keep your eyes down," she whispered. "I'm going to look around the perimeter of the compound. Wait here, come and find me if anything remotely concerning happens."  
  
"Gods, look at my haircut I had -"  
  
"Are you listening to me?"  
  
"Yes, yes. I'm sorry. I'll be here."  
  
Janeway must've known I was just focused enough to comprehend the essentials or I'm sure she wouldn't have gone ahead. Instead I waited, gazing around the old square. It was almost eerie how little it had changed. Even the untouched landscapes in the outskirts changed over four rotations, the trees thinning in places and thickening in others, the wildlife moving further out. In the square everything was exactly as I remembered it. People shivered as they went about their business, trying to keep their eyes averted from the domestic guard that lined the streets. A garrison entered the place with their boot soles clicking in unison, telegraphing their arrival from blocks away. The drumbeats began in perfect sync with their steps, the rhythm announcing with painful familiarity that somebody was being led to die.  
  
Seven hells and all of their demons, not again!  
  
The procession, the old execution squad followed by a senior academy class as it turned out, clanked its way down the street leading to the square and continued to the platform in the center. The class came to halt in perfect formation as if seated at a theater and the squad of six veteran soldiers proceeded up the stairs to the wooden planks of the stage a good five meters above the ground, surrounding the condemned individual who had no choice but to move with them.  
  
My stomach twisted and clenched and unclenched and I was forced to tug at my collar, which was suddenly choking me. I could almost see the steam rising from within my shirt into the frigid air.  
  
Notagainnotagainnotagainnotagainnotagainnotagainnotagainnotagainnotagainnota gain.  
  
I stood with my squad in silent formation, staring straight ahead, watching only with my peripheral vision. They brought the man up the steps. I was so sure of myself, so sure of my life. Still, I tried not to look.  
  
I tried not to look. I leaned against the wall of a nearby shop, trying to get control of my rapidly beating hearts and wishing Janeway would hurry. I felt like I was the one about to meet her doom.  
  
They brought the man to the incineration pad and secured him to the stake in its center. The veteran squad stepped back to the corners of the platform as the officer in charge stepped up to address my class, giving the wrote speech that preceded any such event, some patriotic dribble that I knew by heart.  
. that I used to know by heart. It was not an officer this time, but one of the Builders themselves, appearing in full silver robes that matched his hair and beard and all the other finery he could assemble into one outfit. It must be a special occasion for one of them to take the time. He was finishing quickly, I thought. Maybe four rotations later he was finally getting bored with it. But then he added something I didn't expect, something new: "Let this serve as an example to all present. An officers uniform does not make one immune to his destiny, the law, The Cause, or simple justice."  
  
I didn't want to look. I could've done something and I didn't. I didn't want to look.  
  
I didn't want to look, not again.  
  
I looked.  
  
Both my hearts stopped.  
  
Dear Gods, no.  
  
Lexei stood on the pad, chin thrust forward defiantly, daring everyone watching to look at him. He was in full uniform and one of the squad actually dared to flash him a small salute, a sick carefully planned spectacle in an effort to make the point that no one could escape the eye of the Builders. Somehow they knew he'd helped me without a word to his superiors. He was about to die because of me.  
  
A button on the incinerator control panel was pushed. The man I didn't know was killed as I watched. I could've done something, and there was no escaping it.  
  
The Builder reached for a button. Lexei stiffened. A fire hotter than any incinerator erupted in my belly.  
  
Not this time. Not again.  
  
"Not again!"  
  
I ran, harder than I ever knew I could. Before the startled soldiers and cadets even fully registered my barely comprehensible scream I was bounding up the stairs to the platform. I charged fiercely past Lexei toward the Builder, his eyes perfectly round by the time I plowed into him, putting him straight into the wooden planks and quite possibly rupturing one of his favorite organs in the process. His shocked moans of pain were the only sounds as I ripped the key cards from his belt and spun toward Lexei, freezing mid-spin as my eye caught the dozens of shocked faces in the cadet squad. It was surreal: Was that what I'd been back then? One innocent, naïve kid among a hundred others? What would I have done if I were there now?  
  
But then I realized that it was far too quiet even without a single exhalation from the cadets. Looking around I found the squad of soldiers on the platform staring at me, frozen. And beyond them, the commoners conducting their business in the square were likewise. Not a muscle moved, not a sound dared challenge the unreal stillness.  
  
So this was it. This was my chance, the one I'd always dreamed of, the one I was so afraid of wasting. And I could only think of one thing to say.  
  
"You call me 'coward'!?" I screamed in fury, "You call me 'coward'?!?!"  
  
My voice pounded off the limits of the square and I was shaken back into the direness of the situation. I expediently turned to Lexei, noting vaguely as I unlocked his irons that he was just as agape as the bystanders were. My slight amusement at that observation shattered when I realized that I had not an iota of a plan to get myself and Lexei out of there, being that we were outnumbered some 250 to 1 and the squad finally beginning to come out of the daze I'd put them in. They began to close in.  
  
My impending doom was interrupted by, of all things, an incredible blasting explosion erupting out of an adjacent alley. Then there was another, very near the cadet formation, and then another that reduced an abandoned kiosk to splinters. Everyone within earshot instinctively ducked and was showered with debris, deafened by the sound. That's when the smoke began pouring out of the blast sites, engulfing the square impossibly fast. All I could see was the endless black smoke. All I could hear was the ringing in my ears. All I could feel was my burning throat and lungs and Lexei's big hand locked in a death grip on my shoulder.  
  
Suddenly, a slender hand seized my wrist and I felt myself being hauled down the platform stairs faster than my feet could handle.  
  
"Hurry, before the smoke clears!" Janeway's voice shouted in my ear over the din.  
  
We somehow found our way to a street and took off in a straight line away from the square. The farther we got, the clearer the air until I heard a distant voice shout from behind me: "There they are!"  
  
The three of us picked up our pace, making ourselves scarce side by side as the thunder of all available soldiers in the square galloped after us.  
  
"This the Earther?" Lexei puffed with a glance at Janeway.  
  
"Yep."  
  
He took a better look, better perhaps than was normally polite and nodded to me in sly approval.  
  
"She's hot."  
  
"Gods, Lexei! This is hardly the time!"  
  
Heat whizzed by my ear, a fired energy bolt. I exchanged a knowing glance with Janeway. Terrific, now we were being shot at.  
  
Before I knew it, we were rapidly approaching the end of the street. As if waiting for us there, standing indifferent to the shots from behind us that we were so desperately ducking and dodging, a giant furry scuzzlebat was waiting for its master. Seeing it herself, Janeway froze in her tracks, her eyes suddenly wide. I suppose they can look a little overbearing to someone unfamiliar: They stand almost as twice as tall as a man, their four legs each as thick as tree trunks and their spiraled horns very menacing in appearance. However, my people had adopted the mighty, herbivorous creatures as beasts of burden centuries ago and currently know them as a staple to our culture.  
  
Lexei and I exchanged a smile. Among other things, scuzzlebats were known for their speed.  
  
"Don't be afraid, Earther. Just get on!" Lexei hurried Janeway, giving her a boost up to the stirrup. Lexei swung aboard behind her, and then reached down to pull me up last, settling me precariously sandwiched between them. A well placed heel to the scazzlebat's rump and we were off on a flying dash to the outskirts.  
  
"What is this thing!?" Janeway yelled.  
  
"It's called a scuzzlebat. It'll have us back to my place in no time!" I answered with a glance over my shoulder at our infuriated pursuers as they fell farther and farther behind us.  
  
"How can it be so fast? It's the size of an elephant!"  
  
"What's an -"  
  
"Uungh!"  
  
Lexei slumped forward onto my back.  
  
"Lexei? Lexei!"  
  
"Don't slow down!" he gasped out of a clenched jaw.  
  
Curse it all, he must've been hit. But he was right; I didn't dare slow the scuzzlebat to trade places with him. I looked to the sky and sent a prayer that it wasn't bad.  
  
In no time at all we were back at my hovel. Before the big scuzzlebat even came to a complete stop I slid off of its back into the snow and caught Lexei who slumped down after me like a sack of sand. Janeway proceeded to prod the beast on to confuse its own trail. For me, all there was in the world was Lexei. I knelt in the snow, holding him as his color rapidly approached that of the frost around us. He was covered in appalling amount of his own pink blood. It spurted from the exit wound in his chest with every beat of his hearts, covering him, covering me.  
  
Being Lexei though, I found him smiling up at me through the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.  
  
"Knew I'd. die in this uniform. But then, so'd you." he giggled in a shaking voice.  
  
"Shut up, Lexei! For once in your life!"  
  
The smile faded, but his eyes were holding mine fast, pleading.  
  
"Melai."  
  
"Lexei, you can't go now!"  
  
"You were right."  
  
Suddenly I couldn't breathe.  
  
"What?" came out of me in a whisper.  
  
"You were right. about the corps. the Builders. you were right. forgive me."  
  
"No, Lexei! No."  
  
"Please, Melai. Forgive me. Oh, Gods! Please forgive me!"  
  
He began to cough, choking on the blood. The spasms forced more blood from the wound, which by then I knew was by his left heart.  
  
I wouldn't be able to save him.  
  
"Lexei, I can't -"  
  
". Fffforgive me. please." he begged, his voice fading.  
  
So this would be the last wish I could grant a dying friend. Knowing we were rapidly running out of time, I held him tighter.  
  
"Of coarse," I somehow managed to work our of my clenched throat, "Of coarse I do."  
  
Lexei smiled again. He kept smiling, and never stopped.  
  
I felt two light hands on my shoulders just before I saw the gentle face of Kathryn Janeway peering worriedly into my eyes as she knelt beside me. She turned her attention to Lexei's body, then tenderly moved one of her hands from my shoulder to cover his eyes in an oddly effective moment of closure. 


	2. The truest friends

I vaguely remember a sort of dizzying sensation enveloping me as Janeway led me into my hovel, her strong arm holding me up, and guided me to a seat on the sleeping mat. I remember distinctly that I sat there while she quietly built up the fire, holding my reeling head in my bloodstained hands. Mostly I remember feeling numb. I hated the soldier who killed Lexei. I hated the Builders for devising a world that would kill Lexei. I hated Lexei for getting himself killed. I even hated Janeway for her part in all of it. Most of all I hated myself. How could I have been so shortsighted? I should've known he'd be watched closely. I should've known that whatever he did would be discovered. I should. The hate made me cold and the cold made me numb.  
  
"Melai?"  
  
Gentle fingers under my chin raised my face and once again I found the worried blue eyes of Kathryn Janeway. She was kneeling before me, seeming unsure of whether her touch would break me to pieces.  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"You're shaking. Are you all right?"  
  
Slowly, I shook my head.  
  
"It's funny, you know? All I wanted was to do something right. Something right, that's all. I thought. I thought that if I could just share that with someone I'd be all right." I swallowed, barely able to continue. "I just got my best friend killed!"  
  
I finally crumbled and fell into Janeway's waiting arms. She held me as the sobs I screamed into her arm racked my helpless body.  
  
"Because of me. because of me Lexei doubted himself! Because of me he broke the rules! Lexei's dead because of me!"  
  
Janeway was quiet for a while, then spoke softly into my hair.  
  
"He died because a soldier shot him. Because of you he got the opportunity to think for himself. Because of you the last thing he saw was a friend. Not everyone can have that gift."  
  
"I'm going to kill them."  
  
"No-"  
  
"Yes I am, I'm going to kill them!"  
  
"No, Melai. You won't."  
  
"I know!"  
  
Gods, I hate being so transparent. I squeezed my eyes shut, wringing the tears out into Janeway's steady sleeve.  
  
"Aw, Janeway. I just. If anybody was going to die, it should've been me! Why did it have to be Lexei?"  
  
"I don't know, Melai. I don't know."  
  
"How are you feeling?" Janeway asked an hour or so after my 2-hour cry, just as the suns were beginning to set. She was sitting across from me at the table after holding me until I'd run out of tears. After she made us both tea infusion we'd been sitting in silence until she spoke up.  
  
"A little better, thank you," I said, trying to smile. "Please forgive me. I know better than to lose my head, honestly."  
  
"Mourning someone close to you when the crisis is over is hardly something to be ashamed of."  
  
Not having the energy for anything but the most blunt form of communicating, I sat back and asked my question: "Janeway, how do you do it? You are a leader. You and your people have nothing but each other. Things happen up there. People get hurt. People don't come home. How do you do it? Is it a hu-man thing?"  
  
"No, Melai. People have different ways of handling loss. Species rarely has anything to do with it - unless of coarse you're a klingon, in which case you'd just puree everything between yourself and the offending party and then eat their heart before it stopped beating."  
  
"Klingons, eh?"  
  
"No ideas, Melai. My point is that when - things - happen, you find ways to keep going until you have the time to reflect on them. I find that focusing on the task at hand does well for me."  
  
"The task at hand, right. Like when you blow things up in the square to get me out of a jam?"  
  
"Your basic Starfleet Academy chemistry. You're just lucky there was gunpowder nearby."  
  
I flashed a crooked grin.  
  
"So now what?"  
  
"Tell me what you can about getting my people out of that compound."  
  
"Honestly? I'd guess the only reason they're not dead already is because the chance to make a spectacle of universal domination by executing a bunch of off-worlders doesn't come around very often and the Builders don't want to waste the opportunity by not taking the time to plan and advertise. Considering everything I know, I'd give your people until sunset tomorrow."  
  
"There must be something I can do, some way to reason with them. Maybe we can strike a deal."  
  
"I told you: Deals, money, profit, the betterment of life in general, or any other motive besides keeping the populace subdued does not interest them."  
  
"Then I'll just have to get them out myself, won't I?"  
  
"There's only bad news!" I informed her with a flail of my hands. "The tower's not even the actual prison. It's just a fortress. The cells are meters underground, surrounded by steel and concrete, magnetically sealed doors, armed guards every nanometer, electrically charged fences."  
  
"So no one gets in or out but authorities?"  
  
"You mean besides the ones who get strip-searched first? Sometimes cadets go there on a sort of career exploration day."  
  
"When does that happen?"  
  
"Last week."  
  
Janeway shrugged away whatever plan she was considering.  
  
That's when there was a rough knock on my door. One of my hearts leaped into my throat, the other froze.  
  
Get a grip, Melai! The task at hand.  
  
With a motion for Janeway to stay silent, I crept to the peephole in my door. I swear that just to look out at the distorted image the warped glass displayed made me shrink by centimeters. A man was occupying my stoop, dressed in the finest long silver robe and crystalline where most people have embroidery. His bald head reflected the fading light of the suns, and his primly trimmed white beard carefully outlined the limits of his jaw. His eyes were cold, his look was cold, and his posture was prim and cold. On either side of him were a total of four big men dressed conservatively in black, the most intense sense of forbidding about them that I had ever sensed.  
  
Shura. I knew it.  
  
The heavy hand on his right busted my door halfway down again. I stepped back slowly, disbelieving.  
  
"What's wrong?"  
  
The task at hand.  
  
I broke out of my panic and seized Janeway's arm, hauled her to her feet, and hustled her to the center of the hovel's single room. There, under the carpet was the door to a coal hull. Nobody used them anymore; nobody even built them anymore. It was just big enough for a certain Earther fugitive.  
  
"Inside!" I said, lifting the door.  
  
"Melai, who's out there?"  
  
"Shura himself!"  
  
Janeway's shoulders fell as she looked at the door.  
  
"Looks like my time's up."  
  
"What?"  
  
"It's me he's after, if I give myself up then maybe he won't even find you here."  
  
"If he finds you here, he'll kill us both! Trust me!"  
  
Janeway chewed her lower lip in a final tense hesitation, then jumped into the coal hull.  
"Open up! Now, in the Builders' names!" the baritone voice at the door was yelling.  
  
I smoothed the wrinkles out of the scene, straightened up, and walked slowly to the door.  
  
Did I say 'door'? I meant 'doom'. And now, ladies and germs, the amazing Builder Shura will make my career as a Madditan go as extinct as the saber-toothed dodo in 9 minutes or less.  
  
Upon entering my abode, Shura took my best chair, his right and left hand men the others, and the remaining thugs stood behind them like hulking razor beasts.  
  
My old training instinctively taking control, I stood at stiff, trembling attention. I couldn't even wonder how they'd found me, though later I'd learn that the two bandits from before had ratted me out after being arrested. I knew what was coming: As soon as he asked the question I'd be choosing between being expelled from an entire nation or not. And as if it could possibly be more complicated, that was far from the extent of it. I was choosing between martyrdom or living, the latter of which could prove to be infinitely more difficult, and following the rules or my hearts, and the fates of Janeway, her crew, myself, any chance of a rebellion.  
  
"Melai of the Krischta family, where is the Earther?"  
  
The bluntness of it struck me like a fist in my face. I looked down.  
  
"You can tell us," Shura said patiently, quietly, knowing that as always, it would be only a matter of time before he got his way.  
  
I could feel myself turning paler and paler. As the two options flashed themselves before me, I took an instant and grabbed the one that presented itself in my mind at the time, no other reason.  
  
"I cannot," I heard my own small voice.  
  
It was the following silence that made me look up at Shura who I found with his shocked eyes ablaze.  
  
"You can and you will."  
  
I looked away and felt the tears forcing themselves into my eyes, then back.  
  
"I will not."  
  
A theatrical pause.  
  
"You will. Because you love your country and the Builders."  
  
I did not hesitate so long with my next response, but I had to fight to get the whisper out of my throat and through my teeth.  
  
"I do not."  
  
Shura finally stood and came to stop centimeters from me. I had to crane my neck to see his flushed complexion.  
  
"Then because you love your world and the memory of your mother, tell me where the Earther is."  
  
Shaking, I said, "Because I love them. I will not."  
  
Shura's eyes narrowed.  
  
"What did you say? Melai, take care. Is this your final world?"  
  
I continued to shake but less form fear than fury.  
  
"It is." I pounded my crossed fists to my chest and held them there. "It is by both my hearts!"  
  
By the next moment, I was down to hands and knees, my head spinning, trying to grasp my senses again as I watched the blood dripping from my nose face form a small puddle on the floor below. Immediately after that, I received a kick to my lowered face, which flipped me into a sprawled supine position. Once my eyes focused I looked up the leg standing on my chest to find Shura, calmly murderous.  
  
"Melai Krischta, former national of the Republic of Madditah. As of this day you are cast outside the law. As an outlaw, any right and courtesy socially offered you in the past is hereby revoked. Any in this world or the next who offer you shelter, protection, or comfort will be deemed treasonous." He leaned closer, his weight crushing me. "Understand this, Melai of the Krischta family: You are now no higher is status than a lump of cold poison and I will make it my personal quest in life to make sure that everyone is aware of that. Any person walking by will sooner cleave your pathetic skull than look on you. Gods only grant you the patience to endure the future you have made for yourself."  
  
Made for myself indeed! It sickened me to think that this man, this horrible man who had killed so many, had brain-washed me for the majority of my life, who led my beloved country with hatred and fear, who was hunting Janeway who only wanted to protect her people to the ends of the world for the unforgivable crime of being different, and now was responsible for the loss of the closest thing I'd ever had to a family, was going to keep doing what he was doing until either he or everyone else was dead.  
  
With a quaking breath, I spat my blood clear up to Shura's sour face. Unfortunately, I missed his reaction except for the part when he kicked me in the head and sent me flopping over onto my belly. As the men exited, they each took a shot at me with their heavy boots: my ribs, my belly, my kidney, and my face again. By the time I heard the door slam shut behind them, it was all I could do just to focus the double vision. An instant later, Janeway was down next to me, lifting my shoulders. One look at her face told me that having heard it all from her perspective was a lot more painful than getting kicked in the face.  
  
"You shee that? I had the firsht one right where I wanted him. Then the othersh jump me," I said through my swollen face, moving my jaw as little as possible.  
  
"Shhh."  
  
Janeway's gentle hands continued to dab at my face, gradually swabbing the blood away. I held a towel full of snow to my bruised ribs.  
  
"You were certainly right when you said that you can't generalize Madditans."  
  
I tried to smile, the simple action pulling at my split lip. It was then that I noticed with the eye not swollen halfway shut that Janeway was lightly sweating and her skin was very pale. I didn't know what I could deduce from that with an Earther, but with Madditans it's not a good sign.  
  
"What're you doing out of bed anyway?"  
  
"Hold still."  
  
"It doeshn't hurt."  
  
"Liar. You'll be eating oatmeal for a month."  
  
"Ote-meel?"  
  
"It's a pasty foodstuff we have back home, ideal for people with damaged teeth." She rung her cloth out in the nearby basin and continued to address my face. "What'll happen to you now?"  
  
"Ash he shaid, I'll make it if I can avoid everybody. The thing to conshider'sh what'll happen to you. Shura'll be back shoon. I can't hold him off forever."  
  
"Indeed. You won't have much of a face left to hold him off with in a couple more visits."  
  
"I've got and exhtra heart and that'sh more than I can shay for you," I teased back. I reached up to touch her face. "Hot, even for you."  
  
She sighed. "Fever."  
  
"Shcavengersh are no match for real healersh, eshpecially when infection shetsh in. I hate to be overly frank, but I think I'll have to find your ship in a hurry. For now you go to bed. I can take care of myshelf."  
  
"No," Janeway said firmly, "I'm not putting you in any more danger."  
  
I didn't like the sound of that.  
  
"What're you shuggeshting?"  
  
"It's time for me to go. I'm sure there's a way into that compound. Once I get my crewmen out, all we need to do is hold out long enough for my ship to find us."  
  
"Don't be rediculoush! You'll freezhe or bleed to death, whichever comesh firsht."  
  
"I'll have to take that chance." She put down the cloth and stood shakily. "You've already done m-more. than."  
  
Her voice trailed off and she nearly passed out. I steadied her before she fell, then ignored her exhausted resistance as I steered her back to the cot.  
  
"I gather there are people who need you to be alive. If you don't want to let them down, you better shtick with me."  
  
"Nice try."  
  
"I know how to shurvive, eshpecially when my biggesht obshtacle ish an idiot like Shura."  
  
"I can't let you die for me in a lost cause - Ungh!"  
  
I quickly drew my hand well away from her wound and supported her by the arm instead of the body.  
  
"Shorry. By the by, your vote of confidenshe ish overwhelming."  
  
Once I let her down on the cot, she fell back against the cushion, panting and strengthless but still managing to look absolutely fierce.  
  
"This has nothing to do with your survival competence, Melai. It's about my responsibilities. You have to let me go!"  
  
"Have to nothing. After jusht sho much time, one shtartsh to get tired of one order after the other."  
  
I picked up her feet and swung them onto the cot with the rest of her, then pulled the quilt up over her shivering body.  
  
"Don't you dare change the subject."  
  
"What shubject?" I demanded, noting just how irritating I must be with an inner smile. Then, turning serious, I sat on the edge of the mat and explained. "The thing ish. I like you, that'sh all. And how you talk of your 'Federation' and your waysh." I paused to look down. "One shtartsh to get tired."  
  
By the time I finished the sentence, she'd passed out. I sighed, knelt next to her, and after a moment's hesitation laid my hands lightly over her would. I don't know how long I stayed there like that, not knowing what to do but watch over her. The same thought kept coming to me over and over, every second I looked at her strong albeit ashen face, every time she wheezed a shallow breath.  
  
I'd give my hearts to make you whole.  
  
I remained in the position last mentioned for perhaps an hour, too emotionally drained to do anything but watch the Earther sleep when there was a startling rap rap rap on my door. Janeway didn't stir, though I jumped clear up to the Voyager ship.  
  
Wow, I thought, Shura doesn't waste anybody's time, does he?  
What didn't occur to me at the time was that government-endorsed angry mobs don't usually knock on their victims' doors. The sound came again, so timid I could barely hear it (also out of character for a vigilante brute squad looking for brownie points from the authorities).  
  
I finally made my deft way to the door, took a breath, opened it a crack, and peered out. If I've ever been surprised in my life, it was then. A young woman in the clothes of a trade-villager occupied my front stoop, a little boy no more than five or six rotations old clutching the ends of her robe and peeking timidly from behind the cover of her leg. Both met my entrance with round, hopeful eyes. Another new experience.  
  
"Are you Melai of the Krischta family?"  
  
"My brow furrowed. "What do you want?"  
  
"You are Melai then?" The woman looked me over and frowned. "Forgive me, I was just expecting someone.taller."  
  
"What do you want?" I asked again, my disposition not helped by her calling me short.  
  
"I'm sorry! I - Please, could we come inside?" she stammered desperately.  
  
After my hesitation, I heard the tired voice piping up from inside the house: "Well, Melai? Let her in."  
  
Janeway's prompt as well as Why not? Again led me to comply.  
  
"Of coarse, please," I waved them inside and closed the door after their halting entrance. I heard a shallow gasp and turned from the door to find the woman halted in her tracks, staring at Janeway in shock. Janeway, sitting up now and propped against the wall relaxed and looked patiently back.  
  
"How do you do. I'm Captain Janeway of the starship Voyager."  
  
The woman turned to me and stage-whispered "She's an off-worlder!"  
  
I straightened up, trying to devise a controlled, non-threatening tone.  
  
"She's my friend."  
  
She made her disbelief obvious until she registered my unspoken assertion that Janeway's presence was not negotiable. The boy however suddenly forgot his outward shyness as it was overrun by a child's amazement. He rushed over to Janeway's side and reached his little hand out to touch her temple.  
  
"Tieghy!" the woman scolded, "That's. not polite."  
  
The boy called Tieghy withdrew in shame.  
  
"It's quite all right," Janeway put in, causing Tieghy's face to light up again. "I'm getting used to it."  
  
She leaned toward him to make the point of interest easier for him to reach.  
  
"Please, sit down," I offered the woman, "You look frozen."  
  
"Thank you."  
  
I threw another log into the stove and then joined her at the table.  
  
"I'm sorry if I was rude. I thought you'd be someone else."  
  
"I can imagine," she said with a slight gesture at my bruises. She looked down at her fidgeting hands, wanting to say something, but not knowing how to start. "They say that. you spat in the eye of the law."  
  
A corner of my mouth quirked upwards at that. Spat in the eye of the law indeed!  
  
"Do they?"  
  
"They say that you were turned over by demons to resist your destiny by deserting your countrymen and trying to keep a traitor from justice."  
  
My eyes narrowed and hackles stood on end.  
  
"Lexei was not a traitor. He was just another soldier who loved his people with both his hearts and died for no reason. Now if you came here to redeem me -"  
  
"They say," she clarified hastily. "They say, not I."  
  
I relaxed a little. "What do you say?"  
  
"I say, you're my only chance at saving someone that I love."  
  
Intriguing, but there's only so much a person in my state of mind at the time is inclined to figure out on her own.  
  
"Who are you?"  
  
"My name is Sandron of the Kleed family, my son Tieghy." She nodded toward the boy who was busily peppering Janeway with questions. "Melai Krischta. earlier in the rotation we hit bad luck and when tax time came we had nothing to give. My husband's been in the compound for two lunar cycles now. I've gotten word that he's sick. I know he'll die if he stays there, but the fee." her voice choked and she fell quiet.  
  
I'm sure I would've been touched if I weren't so bewildered.  
  
"I'm. sorry to hear that," I broke the silence, hoping it would prompt an explanation of what I had to do with anything.  
  
She answered all my questions with four words: "You're my only chance."  
  
".. What a minute -"  
  
"Tieghy isn't getting enough food as it is. There's no way we'll meet the sum to save my husband."  
  
"Wait a minute -"  
  
"You were an academy cadet, the top of your class. If anybody can get in and out of the compound, you can. You're an outlaw already, what've you got to lose?"  
  
"Wait a minute!"  
  
"Melai," Janeway's steady voice broke into my panic, "I think you should calm down and hear what Mrs. Kleed has to say."  
  
Sandron pounced on my hand and clutched it between hers as though it was an ember that meant the difference between a long meaningful life and agonizing death by hypothermia.  
  
"Please. Please, Melai of the Krischta family. My husband only wanted to feed his family. He does not deserve to die in there." She turned her glazing eyes toward her son where he was still busy making a new friend. As she did so, Janeway lolled her head toward me in a glance and I shrugged desperately. "My son shouldn't grow up without his father. I fear he'll grow to hate the world that took his father from him."  
  
Oh, my hearts. One little - well, I suppose not so little, but just one anyway - incident that I made a bit too public and I had people showing up on my doorstep asking for extremely illegal favors.  
  
"I don't think you understand, Ma'am. I don't habitually do this kind of thing."  
  
"Really?"  
  
I shot a face at Janeway who blanked her own in return.  
  
"I swear on my birthstars I wouldn't be here if I wasn't desperate. I know nothing of the compound or military ways. There's nothing I can do on my own. I'll do anything, anything you ask if you'll only try."  
  
So much sometimes being too much, I said "Would you excuse me for a minute? Um, please, sit by the fire."  
  
"Of coarse. Tieghy," Sandron called her son.  
  
I moved to sit wearily at the edge of the mat. Janeway's pale face bore an understanding look, but she said nothing.  
  
"Maybe if I give her an answer she'll go away."  
  
"I don't think you mean that."  
  
"You know I don't." Fully aware of the naked pleading in my own eyes, I asked her "What would you do?"  
  
"I'll never know enough about your culture, your values to tell you that."  
  
"I think we share the values concerned."  
  
"Then what's holding you back?"  
  
I looked sadly at the floor. "What I know is that people who go in there don't come out. What I don't know is what on Rycose IV a skinny little academy dropout is supposed to do about it. What I think. I still can't shake the feeling that this is my last chance. I know it's selfish."  
  
"That's what it is? You're afraid of wasting your chance."  
  
"I'm scared out of my mind, Janeway. If I screw up now, I can tell you exactly what'll happen: The Builders will use me to show everyone what happens to anyone who gets in their way. No one will stand up again."  
  
"And if you hide for the rest of your life, then what's the point -"  
  
Janeway lapsed into a fit of coughing, during which all I could do was steady her.  
  
"Gods, Janeway. Those two over there want me to save the world and I can't even save you properly. They think that one person can change an entire social structure as easily as changing her mind from wanting eggs or bread for breakfast. Now, you and I know that things are not so simple."  
  
"I won't lie by telling you that there's an easy answer to this," Janeway concluded, still trying to catch her breath. "All I can tell you is that I'm getting my people out of that compound tomorrow one way or the other, but that can't be what makes up your mind. So the question remains: What would you do?"  
  
I continued to study the floor, letting the Earther's words settle in. What would I do? Indeed. For a moment I considered announcing that I needed time to think, but I was so damned sick of thinking that I'm afraid I would've retched if I tried. But then, I didn't have to. I'd known the answer since Lexei died in my arms.  
  
After running a weary hand down my tender face, I looked back up at my Janeway.  
  
"Will you help me?"  
  
She reached to give my shoulder a squeeze.  
  
"We'll help each other. Now tell me, did you happen to hang onto your cadet uniform?"  
  
With each trotting step Mrs. Kleed's scuzzlebat took as it carried Janeway and myself into town, I felt the jostle in every high-strung nerve. Even more, I felt it in my uneasy stomach.  
  
I was vaguely disappointed that the cadet uniform I'd had buried in a box in the frozen ground of my front yard since I'd left the academy still fit me. I was hoping I'd grow another cm or two while the growing was good. But on the contrary: I still had to roll up the gray pant cuffs to keep them from tripping me, and I could've sworn that before my hands actually extended all the way out of the sleeves. Before we left the Kleeds behind at the relative safety of my house, Janeway remarked that I looked 'dashing' in it. I couldn't help noting the strained way she hid her smirk.  
  
"How are you doing, Melai?" Janeway asked as the buildings of the metropolis came into view.  
  
"I don't know," I said quite honestly. "It's odd - I know I ought to be. scared, or. anxious in the very least. It's like there's just not room inside me for those things now."  
  
I heard Janeway sigh behind me. Her hands slowly began to knead my tense shoulders.  
  
"Melai of the Krischta family, I hope you never understand."  
  
My own smile flashed and disappeared when Janeway began to cough again.  
  
"You're getting worse, aren't you?"  
  
"It doesn't matter," she pressed when she caught her breath. "This is one mission I intend to see through."  
  
I dropped my shoulders and despaired in the fact that the fate of the compound's most innocent inmates rested on them. Of course there was also Janeway, but she was slowly falling apart at the seams. Suffice it to say that I was not confident that her plan would work, and the best I had any right to hope for was for just one of us to survive.  
  
We made it trotting into the city and headed down a quiet street toward the square. On the edge of the square, we parked the scuzzlebat behind the corner of a building. After sliding off myself, I lent my shoulder to Janeway that my support would lessen the jostle to her wound. She still tried to hide her cringe when her feet hit the ground. I steadied her until her hands on my shoulders began slowly squeezing into the muscle and releasing, rhythmically working out a bit of the tension. I found Janeway's blue eyes looking dead into mine.  
  
"Are you sure this is what you want?"  
  
I tried to will a nod from my trembling body.  
  
"You can do this," she firmly assured me.  
  
"S-sure, sure I can."  
  
Janeway nodded and went to take her position. It was amazing to me how sure she seemed, practically jogging along the square's perimeter toward the compound. I on the other hand watched the compound take up steadily more of my field of view as I walked slowly toward it, each step drumming out my impending doom. The plan was that since only people in uniform had any business being anywhere near the compound, I could get close enough to engage a guard at one of the less obvious entrances in some sort of discussion. The idea was that the distraction would give Janeway the opportunity to work her way behind him from some handy area of cover and incapacitate him if necessary. When I asked her just what I was supposed to discuss, she said something about my train of thought, his favorite color, my favorite color; anything as long as I kept him interested. Then I asked what we'd do once inside. She said "Leave that to me." Hooray.  
  
We selected a door to the rear that met a loading dock where I found a junior officer who was no more than a boy, a wet-behind-the-ears pup guarding. I approached carefully, trying to look casual. I tried to talk to him, joking about the weather and teasing him about his glorious assignment. He stood there like a statue, just like the handbooks said. Desperate, I resorted to the heavy artillery.  
  
"Boy, why are you being such a dick?"  
  
The poor sentry was immediately flustered beyond repair (while the Madditan military has regulations of conduct and duty, it also has codes of honor which demand protection). Instead of responding with a calm, reasonable 'Oh, isn't that mature?', his voice found its way to a point about two octaves higher than it was ever meant to be.  
  
"I'm not a dick, you're a dick!"  
  
"Sorry kid, but you're definitely a dick. I mean, here I am trying to be friendly and you're standing there making me talk to the wall, you stupid dick."  
  
"I am not! You're a dick!"  
  
"No, you're confused again. You're such a dick, your initials ought to be U.R.A. Dick."  
  
"Shut up! I am not!"  
  
"Get over it, dick. You're the master of dickitude and you rule over your dickdom with an iron fist to keep it from falling."  
  
"I am not a dick!"  
  
"Oh yes you are, Your Dickness. You're a dick."  
  
"You're a dick!"  
  
"You're a dick."  
  
"You're a dick!"  
  
"You're a dick."  
  
"You're a dick!"  
  
"You're a dick."  
  
"You're a dick!"  
  
I had to pause to formulate my rebuttal.  
  
"You're a dick!"  
  
"You're a dick!"  
  
"You're a dick-dick, you little dick."  
  
"Shut up and back off!" he finally yelled, sharply bringing the nose of his rifle up to my chin.  
  
"Well, this is a dickish thing to do, don't you think you flying dick? You're pointing that thing at me just because I called you a dick. Anybody ever tell you that you look like a dick with a hat on?"  
  
"Hey, you call me 'dick' one more time and I'll blow out your eyes and spit down your ocular cavities!"  
  
"Is that so? Can't you read between the lines? I love you!"  
  
I grabbed his head and planted a shamelessly hardy kiss. I held him there as he choked, hoping to find Janeway behind him. Actually when I looked up, there she was, not two paces closer to the doorway than my new friend and me and staring with one of the most disbelieving looks I've ever seen. I had to force all of the situation's direness into my eyes alone to break her out of the shock. Once back in the moment, she promptly bashed in the guy's head.  
  
I observed him as he lay moaning on the ground.  
  
"Dumb dick."  
  
"This is your train of thought?"  
  
"I told you I was weird," I said with an apologetic shrug.  
  
Janeway looked half amazed, half amused.  
  
"Come on, Melai."  
  
We stole the guard's gun and slid into the compound. A dimly lit hallway lined with stone walls and a few heavy doors. Janeway looked to me and I pointed to the door at the very end of the hallway that I recalled from my cadet tour as the way to the stairwell. We glided toward it with the greatest stealth, stopping only to duck behind a corner as a pair of guards came marching down an intersecting hallway. We silently listened to their fading steps. Threat passed, we continued in haste.  
  
"Electronic lock," Janeway observed the control panel next to the door.  
  
"Voice and key code activated. We'll never -"  
  
Before my eyes, Janeway raised the guard's rifle and fired it into the panel, resulting in an impressive display of yellow sparks and a fist-sized hole. She proceeded to fiddle with the wires within as distant voices alerted each other to the suspicious noise and heavy footsteps began rushing toward us.  
  
"Janeway -" I said nervously.  
  
"Hold on."  
  
Janeway remained in deep concentration until the last possible second when the door suddenly slid open, we jumped inside, and the door promptly slid shut behind us.  
  
"How'd you do that?" I demanded.  
  
"Do you really want a crash course in Starfleet engineering right now?"  
  
I nodded. "Another time."  
  
Down the stairs we went. The farther down we descended the darker it got, the fewer the guards, and the more numerous the barriers. Janeway dispatched them one by one with her Starfleet magic. Finally, behind the last door, we found the deepest, darkest, coldest, filthiest place the Builders could devise. On the right was a solid stone brick wall coated in a fine layer of bacterial sludge. The floor was composed of rough, sharp rocks. Straight ahead, there was no end in sight. And to the left were the cells, four square meters each, separated from the hallway and each other by barbed and electrified chicken wire, humming with the voltage.  
  
The first few cells were empty. The next contained several skeletons and decaying carcasses responsible for the barely tolerable odor that suffocated the enclosed space. Next came the cells that housed the compound's live victims. Most huddled tightly against the far wall when they heard us coming, their spirits broken, caring only about as much pain as they could. Some were sick and dying, all wallowed in filth. The hallway itself seemed unending.  
  
"How do we know which one is Mr. Kleed?" Janeway brought up as we proceeded deftly down the hall.  
  
"Mathias of the Kleed family? Mr. Kleed, are you there?" I put into the air.  
  
I heard movement not far ahead. A few cells later, Janeway and I found a tall man who in all ways resembled one of the farmers in the Madditan villages. He bellied defiantly up to the chicken wire.  
  
"I am Mathias of the Kleed family. I'll give you no trouble, but please leave the rest of these people alone."  
  
"Mr. Kleed, I'm Captain Janeway of the starship Voyager. This is Melai of the Krischta family-"  
  
"How do you do," I snuck in.  
  
"- We don't have time to explain, but when the time comes, look for us and we'll take you to your family."  
  
We left him standing with his mouth agape and continued down the hallway. I was beginning to fear that Janeway's people weren't even there after all when we hit the very last cell before the stone dead end. Inside were four figures, two men and two women. One of the women had human features, yellow hair, and blue shoulders where Janeway's were red. She sat on the floor with her back to the wall. The other had gold shoulders and a series of ridges on her forehead. She was pacing the confines of the cell with heavy, determined strides like a trapped animal. A pointy-eared man dressed in the same colors was standing in the center of the cell like a statue with his arms folded tightly across his chest and his brows drawn into what looked like permanent scowl. The last was sitting cross-legged on the floor at the back of the cell with his eyes closed and his head slightly bowed. My eyes widened when I saw him. Even sitting, he was tall, powerful. His face was dashingly handsome, and marked by a patterned design above his left eye.  
  
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Janeway's people.  
  
Janeway herself was eyeing the cables that ran across the low ceiling to supply the wire barriers with thousands of volts of electricity. Just as I was categorizing the situation as hopeless, she turned and looked at me, or more specifically, my feet.  
  
"Your boots," she said thoughtfully. "Are they rubber-soled?"  
  
"So are yours."  
  
"Good. Take them off and give me a boost."  
  
"What are you going to do?"  
  
"Trust me."  
  
I complied as she took off her own boots. When she climbed up on my shoulders I could no longer see what she was doing, but over the next few minutes I would see a shower of white sparks rain down on me and immediately afterwards, Janeway dropped one pair of boots. She continued to work as I looked at them on the ground before me, finding the soles nearly melted off and singed black. The display was repeated with the other pair of boots and the electric hum of the chicken wire was gone.  
  
Janeway came down from my shoulders and immediately set to work on the mediocre lock of the cell 'door'.  
  
"Who's there?" the man in the back demanded.  
  
"Be quiet, Chakotay! It's me!"  
  
So this was Chakotay. No wonder she spoke his name in her sleep.  
  
"Captain!" all of them said in near unison.  
  
Janeway soon manipulated the door into opening and I hung back in the shadows as she went in. I watched a miraculous reunion. Everyone except the one with the pointed ears touched her in some way, a squeeze of her shoulder, a hand on her arm as though making sure she was real. All of them, even Pointed Ears looked like they wished to do more, to embrace her and hold on for hours, but some unspoken rule kept them from it.  
  
"They told us you were dead!" the woman in gold said.  
  
As if on cue, Janeway's face went stark white and she swayed. Chakotay caught her before she fell.  
  
"Captain, are you well?" Pointy asked with a deeper frown.  
  
Chakotay removed his hand from where it happened to cover her wound and examined the palm, then showed it to the others. It was covered in blood.  
  
"We have to get her out of here," Chakotay announced. "B'ellana, Tuvok, Wildman, let's get to work on the locks of the other cells. If all the prisoners escape at once, everyone'll have a fighting chance."  
  
"I'm all right," Janeway protested as Chakotay half-carried her out of the cell.  
  
"Like hell," he retorted.  
  
"Commander -" Pointy broke in sharply.  
  
Chakotay and the others jumped at his warning. I spun around, expecting to find a threat behind me, but there was nothing but the gloomy hallway. I looked back at the small group of Fed's for an answer and found them staring guardedly at me. The next thing I knew, the woman in gold pounced viscously, pinning me to the wall with a thud. I flinched as she raised her hand to strike.  
  
"B'Elanna, no!"  
  
The strike didn't come and I dared to open one eye. The one called B'Elanna was looking over her shoulder at Janeway in surprise.  
  
"This is Melai," Janeway said. "She saved my life."  
  
B'Elanna looked me up and down, then gently let me go.  
  
"Sorry," she said sheepishly.  
  
"Don't mention it," I coughed.  
  
"Well? You heard the man. Grab those locks and get cracking."  
  
At Janeway's order, the team jumped into grim action. Within minutes, all cells on the floor were opened. The prisoners inside were hesitant at first, approaching their opened doors like a hunter does a razor beast he's not quite sure is dead. Thankfully, they grew bold and began forming a mob of perhaps 70 in the hallway. It was Mathias who had to find me in the sudden din.  
  
"You said you'd take me to my family," he said above the noise.  
  
I looked desperately around for the Fed's, each of whom I found battling their way through the crowd toward me. Together we made it to the door. There we began our ascent. Soon the sirens began to blare, but every guard that got in our way was nearly trampled in the stampede. The clog of desperately moving bodied was like being trapped under the waters of a raging river.  
  
I counted the floors until the main floor. There's something about a prison that almost exclusively houses condemned prisoners that gives me claustrophobia. When I actually emerged onto the main floor, relieved to finally have the beacon of the front door in my sight, I was jerked out of the stream of people by my elbow. I was drawn into a nook in the hallway the size of a large closet where the Fed's and Mr. Kleed had convened.  
  
"Why are we stopping?" Mr. Kleed demanded.  
  
"Because they have our weapons. They're the only tactical advantage we have against the authorities. We can't leave them here," B'Elanna said.  
  
"We don't have time! They could be anywhere in -" I stopped short, remembering an old lesson on the floor plan of the compound. The instructor had pointed out a certain. "My gods, I know where they are!"  
  
"Do you have a way out of here?" Chakotay said.  
  
"Yes. Our scuzzlebat is parked across the square."  
  
"Good. Melai, tell me where to go and the rest of you get the hell away from here."  
  
"No," Janeway said. "You're not doing this alone."  
  
"Fine. Then I'll go with him," I said before I could change my mind.  
  
Without giving Janeway time to protest, the others took her out of the compound.  
  
"We'll wait as long as we can. Hurry!" B'Elanna called.  
  
"This way," I directed Chakotay to an adjacent hallway.  
  
To be continued.  
Please review. I've worked really hard on this. 


	3. The Kraken

Thanks to the folks who reviewed. I hope this next part does your hearts good. Turtle  
  
I led Chakotay to the place I remembered as the security captain's office. At the time I'd been introduced to the place, the position was held by a professor of mine who had always made it quite clear that he approved of me. on a few different levels. Anyway, one night after some drinking, he ran into me in a hallway and immediately tried to romance me by giving me his resume`. I nodded politely as he droned on, wishing neither to disgrace him, nor to incur his drunken wrath. Somewhere along the line, he happened to mention a certain safe compartment in the floor.  
  
After breaking into said office (with considerable ease amidst the chaos of the escapees, I may add), we found, in said compartment, a variety of gadgets with little blinking lights as well as five pins fitting the description of that which Janeway had once mentioned. We completed the heist with a dash to a side entrance. Our only obstacle was a smattering of guards remaining here and there, each of whom Chakotay dispatched quite handily with a sucker punch to the face.  
  
The scene outside was delicious. A full-scale riot was already in progress: Prisoners stampeded from the compound's front door in all directions, people crowded to see what in the world was happening, and soldiers scattered like headless farm birds as they tried in vain to reclaim their authority. Chakotay and I, staying low from the compound's side exit easily slipped around the fray until we made it to the end of the alley where our scuzzlebat was parked. At the opposite end, the rest of our party was already mounted and were anxiously waiting.  
  
"Here they come!" Torres yelled when she spotted the commander and me sprinting toward her.  
  
"There they go!" screeched a frantic baritone soldier behind us.  
  
Chakotay and I ran with all our might, closer and closer to the outstretched hands of our group that were just waiting to pull us up onto the scuzzlebat's back. All the while, the soldiers gained on us. It was like running downhill from a lava stream, the intensity, and the burning sensation at my heels as I sensed the boiling mad soldiers.  
  
Almost there. almost there.  
  
I plastered my hand around Tuvok's and as he and Torres were still pulling me up, the scuzzlebat took off at its amazing speed. When I looked over my shoulder to find Chakotay safely aboard behind Tuvok, I saw a rapidly clustering mob of infantry dashing after us. By the time we burst out of the city confines, the horns and alarms were deafening. Just how far ahead Janeway had thought, I didn't know. I had no idea where we were going or what we'd do when we got there. The thing that I found most obscene was when I noticed that we seemed to be headed for my place.  
  
We couldn't be! I thought as we sped along, dodging artillery fire the whole way. That'd just be goofy. They know where I live. It's the first place they'll come for us! I'm sure Janeway realized that. Oh, there's the road to my place. and here we are in the outskirts. Hey look, here comes my yard!  
  
It became more and more apparent with each step that the scuzzlebat took where we were going.  
  
"Look out!" Chakotay yelled, half a moment before someone yanked me down over the scuzzlebat's back and held me there as energy weapon blasts began to pierce the air around us.  
  
"Holy hells!"  
  
"Keep going, we're almost there!" Janeway yelled.  
  
The war cries of the hundreds of soldiers in our pursuit nearly drowned my own thoughts.  
  
Buck up, Melai. A merry chase is a grand way to go.  
  
The bodies shielding me suddenly lifted and the scuzzlebat came to a skidding halt. The next thing I knew, I was being yanked off of the scuzzlebat, onto the ground, to my doorstep, through my door. The momentum of my journey carried me head first into the rear wall of my house's one room, ending with a painful smack and a flash of stars. I slid slowly down the wall to the floor. As I lay dazed, I heard Janeway's voice.  
  
"Everyone, set phasers to wide beam and fire on my mark. Now!"  
  
That's when it happened: First a burst of shocked shrieks from the soldiers outside. Then, nothing. There was no was no sound at all outside of my house. Just when they should've been battering down my door, there was only a thick eerie silence in its place.  
  
"Is everyone all right?" I heard Janeway pant.  
  
"Melai?"  
  
Suddenly, there were four very fuzzy Wildmans obstructing my view of the ceiling.  
  
"Yeeeeeess?"  
  
"Are you hurt? Can you tell me where you are?"  
  
I blinked.  
  
"I could until about 3 days ago."  
  
The four Wildmans smiled and extended their right hands to me, and I found the real one by process of trial and error. Once they pulled me to my feet, they focused into one. I observed the scene before me: Mr. Kleed was off in a corner, passionately embracing his wife as she wept for joy into his shoulder and little Tieghy clung to his father's leg for dear life. Everyone else was crouched on the floor, 'phasers' in hand, all cautiously lifting their heads to find nothing imminently dangerous about the situation.  
  
Staying low, Tuvok crept silently to my front window and peeked over the sell. Whatever it was that he saw, his expression remained completely untouched. Torres and Wildman followed suit, leaving Janeway on the floor, positioned on forearms and knees and trying to remain conscious. Chakotay stayed with her, reluctant to leave her unshielded from any harm that may come. As for me, curiosity finally got the better and I slid over to the window, standing on tiptoes to see over the others' heads.  
  
There are no words that readily come to mind as I struggle to think of how to convey my unguarded astonishment over what I saw, so I'll just tell you what it was: A battalion, an entire battalion of soldiers stood frozen, a field away from my front yard. Between their front lines and my house, there was a strip of the ground measuring the length of the field by about five paces in width. In that strip, a line of soldiers lay motionless in a river of melted snow.  
  
As the dumbstruck soldiers stared at their fallen comrades, my eyes bounced from the scene to the Feds' weapons and back. It was impossible. Those five tiny little things? That extent of force? Stopping an entire battalion in its tracks with the push of a button? Impossible!  
  
Moments passed into minutes. Nobody on either side moved, barely breathed until the deep, cold voice from somewhere amongst the soldiers echoed across the field.  
  
"Off-worlder Janeway. I give you one chance to come with peace."  
  
"Chakotay, help me to the window."  
  
Reluctantly, the big man supported her as she staggered to her destination. Once there, she took a deep breath and spoke in a steady, penetrating voice.  
  
"Builder Shura. Be advised that with our weapons, we can easily match the firepower of your entire battalion. Any attempt to incapacitate us will be met with the deadliest force, and while these people are here they are under my protection. Go home and I won't come after you."  
  
Gods bless you, Kathryn Janeway.  
  
A long silence followed. No one moved, any of us inside the house, not a single soldier. All eyes were on Shura, waiting for his call.  
  
"Come out and meet me halfway from where I stand to Melai's door. Bring two of your people, I'll bring two of mine."  
  
Janeway seemed to think it over. Chakotay immediately disapproved.  
  
"Captain, don't. It's got to be a trap."  
  
"We can't keep this up for long, Chakotay. If there's any chance to stall, I'm going to take it. Tuvok, you're in charge back here. Chakotay, Melai, you're with me."  
  
We made our way to the designated area at a slow pace set by Janeway, I think partly to keep from intensifying the situation with a rush, and partly because Janeway was determined to walk upright on her own, and this was as efficient as she could be in her deteriorating condition. Shura actually stopped a little closer to his own troops than was wise for us to proceed. Seeing this, Janeway stopped something short of the halfway point as well. Our group and Shura's (which included not two foot soldiers, but six, I noted with a scowl) stood about twenty paces apart, close enough to talk without yelling. Barely.  
  
"Captain Janeway," Shura began, his calm cold tone betrayed by his flushed and clammy face. "How many times do I have to kill you?"  
  
"That depends on how much time you've got," Janeway retorted evenly, though Chakotay was looking ready to break Shura in half on the spot.  
  
Shura stiffened visibly, then smiled as he turned his attention to an easier target.  
  
"Melai. You're getting quite the reputation, aren't you girl? Especially with that boy - What was it? Lexei? Oh, yes. I'm sure he's glad to have known you now."  
  
Gods help me, you sonuva.  
  
"What do you want, Shura?" Janeway broke in with a steadying hand on my trembling shoulder.  
  
"Captain, you once asserted that the preservation of life is important to you above all else. If that is true, you should find my proposition attractive."  
  
"Go on."  
  
"Surrender now and there will be no loss of life in an attempt to defend yourselves, after which you would only be captured anyway. You and your crew members will then be taken to the capital for trial."  
  
"On what charge? Passing through? Trampling the grass?" Chakotay demanded.  
  
Janeway held up a hand to quiet him.  
  
"I have a better idea. You leave us alone until we can contact our ship, we'll be on our way, and never bother you again. Melai and the others can decide for themselves."  
  
"I'm afraid that I cannot allow that."  
  
"Why? What are you afraid of? You're a fool if you think you'll benefit from killing us."  
  
"But I will. I'll benefit for the same reason that all of these children in my armies are so ready to die for me. These are my people, Captain. Weakness is not an image that I will project to them. I hope you can see my dilemma if I let you go."  
  
"Did it ever occur to you that your people may see it as an act of compassion rather than weakness?"  
  
"What's the difference?"  
  
"I am going to make my offer one more time: We will go back to our ship, or we will go down fighting. We will not go back with you."  
  
"I see. In that case, I challenge you, Captain Kathryn Janeway of the starship Voyager to the bashahm. This spot tomorrow at dawn, or the shooting begins."  
  
With that, Shura turned on his heel and led his lackeys briskly back from whence they came, leaving the captain and commander exchanging confused frowns and myself suddenly 86'ed into hopelessness.  
  
"Oh, shazzbot." my tiny voice came out.  
  
"Melai, what's he talking about?"  
  
I craned my neck to meet the commander's eyes as he ducked under Janeway's arm, held it across his shoulders, and put his own about her waist. She sagged against him, exhausted.  
  
"A bashahm," I said, surprised through the shock-induced daze. They'd understood every other word in my language so well. But then, few people knew that the bashahm was still in the Madditan laws as an option. I myself had heard of it once in a school lecture and never thought of the practice since. I shook my head. Chakotay sighed.  
  
"We need to get her inside."  
  
"I'm all right, Chakotay," Janeway stressed in exasperation.  
  
"And I'm Arachnia, Queen of the spider people."  
  
We made it back to the ranch and I skipped ahead to open the door for Chakotay, though the captain didn't seen to burden him at all. Immediately, her crew jumped into usefulness, the stoic one with the pointed ears supporting her on her free side while the two females hastily straightened the tangled bedclothes on my sleeping mat. Deposited there, Janeway lay back, panting through her teeth. The crew gathered around her, kneeling. I watched all that went on from there at a safe distance across the room.  
  
"Report, Chakotay," Janeway said.  
  
Chakotay gingerly lifted the shirt cloth away from her flank and discovered the rapidly filling pad of makeshift bandage. Everyone who looked anxiously over his shoulder made some sign of their shock evident.  
  
"My God," the big man breathed. "You're shot?"  
  
"Surprise. Now I want a report, Commander."  
  
"There's not much to say, really. After you were separated, we were brought to the compound and we've been there since. They told us you'd been killed." He paused and hinted a smile. "Thank God for small favors. Anyway, it seems we've missed a little more than you have."  
  
Janeway smiled weakly back.  
  
"You don't know the half of it."  
  
"Captain, Ensign Wildman must examine you now. I suggest that you continue your description as she proceeds."  
  
Janeway nodded at Pointy's suggestion and the woman in blue nudged her way past the others to Janeway's side.  
  
"I'll need some water, please," she announced.  
  
I scurried outside and filled a water bucket with snow. When I came back inside and set it on the stove to melt, Janeway was speaking in a low voice.  
  
". And when I woke up, I was here. Apparently I drifted in and out for about a day and a half."  
  
"But how did you survive? Bleeding, out there alone?" Torres said.  
  
Janeway looked past her crew to me.  
  
"Commander Chakotay, Commander Tuvok, Lieutenant Torres, Ensign Wildman. I'd like you to meet Melai of the Krischta family, my lucky penny."  
  
Everyone turned to look at me. I answered with a timid little wave.  
  
"Thank you," Chakotay said sincerely.  
  
"You're, um, you're not all the same race."  
  
"Lieutenant Torres is a klingon-human hybrid. I myself am Vulcan."  
  
"Vulcan, I see. You're even more funny looking than a hu-man."  
  
The one called Tuvok lifted an eyebrow as the others tried to stifle their chuckles. Realizing what I'd just said, I bit my tongue and shrank.  
  
"God's, I hope I didn't say that out loud just now."  
  
The Vulcan's face remained etched in stone.  
  
"I laugh nearly all the time," he said.  
  
"Is-is she okay?" I asked.  
  
"She's bleeding. Do you have something clean that I can use for pressure?"  
  
I went to my linen cabinet to oblige Ensign Wildman's request.  
  
"Melai brought me here. She took care of me and helped me break into the compound. Helping us, she's made herself an outlaw."  
  
"Oh, they would've outlawed me anyway. It was just a question of timing," I assured as I delivered the clean rag and heated water. Wildman began by soaking the presently utilized bandage to loosen it.  
  
"We've already had an adventure in town, not to mention a spat with Shura," Janeway continued.  
  
"The Doctor's going to have a fit when he finds out."  
  
"Thank you, B'Elanna. I had no idea."  
  
"Lieutenant, you'll have to take her shoulders."  
  
Torres went to hold Janeway steady and Wildman slowly peeled the bandage away, trying to disturb the clot as little as possible. Janeway's jaws bunched as she stifled a gasp. There was small wonder it hurt so much. Infection had set in again with a firm hold. Wildman hurriedly set to work.  
  
"Keep talking," Chakotay encouraged. "What's this 'bashahm' that Shura mentioned?"  
  
"You're asking me? Agh, God!"  
  
"Sorry," Wildman said.  
  
"The bashahm," I put in haltingly. "It's an ancient practice. Nobody's bothered with it for decades."  
  
"Continue," Commander Tuvok said.  
  
"Well, it's. kind of like a gauntlet at first. The challenger and the challenged assemble as many of their volunteers as they can get into two rows, and then they run between each other's rows while their opponent's friends try to beat them silly from either side. If both survive, then they try to bludgeon each other in unarmed combat."  
  
"What?" Everyone but Janeway and Tuvok shrieked.  
  
"I know, it's silly."  
  
"Curious. Why would Shura go through such trouble?" Tuvok wondered aloud.  
  
"Because he only picks battles that he knows he'll win. He knew that Janeway was wounded."  
  
"Can she choose a champion?" Torres asked hopefully.  
  
"I don't think so. What's a champion?"  
  
"Then what happens if I refuse? Aigh!"  
  
"Sorry."  
  
I shrugged. "Chances are he'll start executing villagers until you agree."  
  
"Then I guess that's out. Unh!"  
  
"Sorry."  
  
"B'Elanna, what are your chances of rigging a distress beacon to Voyager?"  
  
"With what we've got? A little better than yours of winning the bashahm. No offense, Captain, but that's not saying much."  
  
"None taken. Get to work."  
  
Torres nodded and Chakotay took her place at Janeway's shoulders. Wildman looked up at him.  
  
"We have to kill some of the bacteria and stop the bleeding before she goes into septic shock. I've never dealt with this kind of thing without the proper tools."  
  
"I have," Janeway said grimly. "Put a poker in the fire."  
  
My hearts froze. From the looks on everyone else, they were experiencing the same problem.  
  
She's not going to -  
  
"Captain, you're not going to -"  
  
"We have no antibiotics, no sterilized tools, not even alcohol. If I'm going to have any chance of surviving a fight tomorrow, I have to do something."  
  
"With some luck, it won't come to that!"  
  
"Don't argue with me, Chakotay. I'm not in the mood."  
  
"Captain, I must protest. This practice was deemed barbaric by your own people centuries ago."  
  
"It was practiced before then for a reason: The resources of the time were limited. See any connection here?"  
  
With great hesitation, Chakotay nodded to Wildman who grimly got up to heed her captain.  
  
"All right, everyone. Start thinking of ways to stall. If we can just hold out long enough for the others to find us, we just might live through tomorrow."  
  
The Feds began to speak in fluent technobabble. I turned away to watch the poker glow red in the fire, dreading the moment when it would be ready. My insides suddenly queasy with the thought, I hurried to open my door for a breath of air and nearly collided with the person standing on the stoop, fist raised to knock. After the initial moment of panic, I was composed enough to take in his face.  
  
". Slam?"  
  
My old friend relaxed his slender shoulders in relief that I wasn't going to kill him after one look at his uniform. He'd barely changed since the academy days, lanky and not too tall. And his eyes still held the shy kindness he always kept hidden, except from me and a select few others.  
  
"Hello, Melai."  
  
"Slam!"  
  
Before I could be suspicious of his agenda, I ensnared him in a hug.  
  
"It really is you!" he whispered in my ear. "Are you all right?"  
  
"Better than some." I let him go and looked him over. "What are you doing here? You shouldn't be here!"  
  
"There are posters up all over town, spreading word that you're not in the law and it's everyone's responsibility to let you know that."  
  
"What do you think?"  
  
"I had to come. With you, I knew there had to be a reason."  
  
"Of course there is, and you're a good friend. But you can't be here. They'll kill you."  
  
Slam's face softened as he read my thought.  
  
"I heard about Lexei. I'm sorry, I know you two were friends."  
  
"I mean it, Slam. There's no reason for you to get roped into this too."  
  
". There is," Slam admitted quietly. "I'm here because my superiors sent me. They knew I could get close to you. and."  
  
"Aw, Slam."  
  
The young man had not a crooked thread in his thin body. What had possessed his folks to have him pursue a military career is way beyond me.  
  
"So what are you going to do?"  
  
"Melai, you didn't honestly think that you're the only one, did you? The only one who's tired of this whole damned blood bath?" Slam took my shoulders tenderly. "There are more like you, like us. All we needed was for someone to get us started."  
  
"Enough! What in the seven hells are you rattling about?"  
  
"Let me join you, righting wrongs and saving people and all. I'm defecting!"  
  
"Slam, I am going to tell you one more time to get away from here. All you have to do is tell your captain that I didn't believe you."  
  
Slam shook his head.  
  
"Not this time. For once I'm putting my foot down. Are you going to tell me what's going on, or am I going to darken your doorstep for the rest of the day?"  
  
I hid my smile, suddenly proud of him.  
  
Several seconds later.  
  
". And tomorrow she has to do the bashahm and she only has me and her crew and maybe Mr. and Mrs. Kleed and she's almost bled out already and - and - we're all probably going to be dead by tomorrow afternoon!"  
  
I panted, realizing I'd just summed up the entire story so far in one breath.  
  
"Wow," said Slam. "I mean, I'll tell you what: Wow."  
  
"May I ask whom you are talking to?"  
  
"Yikes! Seven hells, Mr. Vulcan, you scared my left heart into stopping!"  
  
Tuvok the Vulcan quirked his eyebrow again.  
  
"My apologies, Ms. Krischta. I was merely curious as to the wisdom of holding a conversation alone with the enemy."  
  
"Is this the Earther?" Slam breathed in awe. "Gods above, it talks!"  
  
I cringed. Slam had never been one of the brightest people I'd ever met, but I honestly didn't know that he could swallow his own foot. Tuvok's demeanor, however, did not change.  
  
"No, I am not 'The Earther'. I'm Commander Tuvok of the starship Voyager and the planet Vulcan. And you are...?"  
  
"Jarl of the Sothos family, but people've called me Slam for so long, I don't think I could answer to anything else."  
  
"Slam, could you excuse us please?"  
  
"Oh, sure! Take as long as you want."  
  
I closed the door and immediately turned to Tuvok.  
  
"I'm really sorry, it's just that sometimes he doesn't know any better -"  
  
"Am I to understand that you're personally acquainted with Mr. Sothos?"  
  
"Y-yes, we were friends at the academy."  
  
"You trust him then?"  
  
"Yes, very much."  
  
"That is fortunate. To put it mildly, we are comparatively short- handed."  
  
I felt my face harden.  
  
"Don't you dare encourage him!"  
  
"It is up to you and the captain. However, as I see that you are a reasonable person, I know that you will find logic in allowing your friend to join us. After all, every advantage is an advantage, no matter how small it may seem."  
  
I stared up at him. That had almost sounded like a compliment. I nodded slowly and Tuvok crossed the room to break into his crewmates' discussion and inform Janeway of the opportunity. Though they kept their voices too low for me to hear, I would have to've been blind to miss the look of puzzlement, and then hope on her ashen face. She gave her answer, and Tuvok turned on his heel to walk back across the room and stop next to me.  
  
"Captain Janeway concurs. However, we would suggest that you wait several minutes before you invite him in."  
  
I took his meaning when I saw Wildman heading toward Janeway, red-hot poker in hand. My skin crept along my spine.  
  
"Oh, hells."  
  
"You do not have to be here for this," Tuvok reminded me.  
  
"N-no, I should stay. You might need me."  
  
Tuvok hesitated, but gave a nod.  
  
"As you wish."  
  
Actually, I didn't wish. I was probably looking forward to it about as much as Janeway. In fact, so was poor Ensign Wildman. She was just standing, thin wisps of smoke from the end of the poker swirling around her, looking helplessly at Janeway.  
  
"Do it," Janeway commanded.  
  
Wildman nodded and swallowed as Tuvok placed a soaked rag in Janeway's mouth. Wildman proceeded. Janeway bit down with all her strength as she screamed into the rag. Her back arced and her shoulders strained against Chakotay's steady hands. Sweat rolled off her face. Looking around the room, I saw just as much pain in everyone else's eyes.  
  
Wildman brought the poker away after the longest ten seconds of my life. Tuvok took the mangled cloth from Janeway's mouth.  
  
". See?" Janeway's ragged voice came out through her weak grin. "That wasn't so bad."  
  
With that, her eyes rolled back and she passed out. Chakotay released a breath he's been holding and began to mop the sweat from Janeway's face with a clean rag. Wildman set to work bandaging the wound. I ran for it.  
  
Just outside the door, I gulped the fresh air. I'd almost forgotten about Slam, but he hadn't moved a centimeter and stood looking at me hopefully. I dropped my shoulders in defeat.  
  
"All right! You can stay."  
  
"Oh, by my grandmother, I'm glad you said that."  
  
"Why, Slam? Why is this so important to you?"  
  
At his suddenly guilty look, I sighed and rolled my eyes.  
  
"Okay, Slam. What didn't you tell me?"  
  
Slam turned to his right.  
  
"It's okay. Come on out," he called.  
  
Before my eyes, three youths appeared from behind the corner of my house. Two males and one female, they were dressed in foreign combat fatigues. That alone raised my suspicions, but as they approached, I saw the real kicker: Their temple markings were not the blue-green of a Madditan, but the orange of the Palaish.  
  
For at least a minute, all I could do was sputter.  
  
"Seventh hell! Slam, what've you done?!"  
  
"Look, Melai, I'm sorry. I didn't know what to do. They were captured trying to save a wounded friend behind our lines. I met them when I was on guard duty at the compound. You know as well as I do how soon they would've been dead." He put his hands on my shoulders again and bore his eyes into mine. "Please, Melai. Look at them, they're just kids. Please."  
  
I looked at them. He was right; they were no more than kids. There was a right thing and a wrong thing to do and I knew it. My eyes fell to the frozen ground and I shook my head.  
  
"Gods, why did you make me such a lunatic?"  
  
Slam and his Palaish companions exchanged joyously relieved smiled.  
  
"Bless your hearts, Melai! I knew I could count on you."  
  
"Yeah yeah yeah, come inside before you get us killed."  
  
My first following. Another new experience.  
  
To be continued.  
  
Thanks again for reading. I'll have the end up by next week if people want to see it. Regards, Turtle 


	4. Miracles

The day drew to a close and several long hours into the night, Janeway began to improve. By some miracle, one of the Palaish was carrying a small dose of medicine very similar to that which Lexei had given me, which Tuvok insisted on administering himself. My Earther friend's entire team stayed by her side, discussion options and watching over her, until finally she came groggily to consciousness. She quickly dismissed her crew's questions about her welfare and insisted on discussion the issues at hand, which the small group did for hours afterwards. In the end, some plan of action was decided on, and everyone went to some corner of the house to prepare for the day to come.  
  
The Fed's were resourceful folks, I observed as I half-understood their schemes to improve Janeway's chances. The Palaish trio, Slam, and the Kleeds enthusiastically promised to help in any way they could. Even so, my hearts were heavy with the sense of foreboding that hung in the room like smoke. It was strange - Janeway seemed to be the only one who didn't give up a stitch of hope.  
  
The middle of that night found me sitting on the cabinet below my window, elbows on the sill, chin on my fists as I stared at the snow beyond my front yard. Normally it was untouched except for my own tracks; the surfaces of the snowdrifts sparkling like glitter under the moonlight. That night it was a mess. The frantic feet of over a hundred soldiers had churned the once-perfect layer of white stillness into a rough, poisoned terrain. How dare they.  
  
Everyone but the Fed's was asleep somewhere on my floor. Though my back was turned to them, I could tell you exactly what each one was doing: Torres would be puttering with her little contraption by the light of the fire in the stove. Tuvok was standing before my other window, keeping watch like a statue. Wildman would pace around the room, looking for small ways to contribute to the cause. Chakotay was trying relentlessly to get Janeway to rest. And Janeway, of coarse.  
  
. startled the seven hells out of me by coming soundlessly up behind me and setting a hand on my shoulder. When our eyes met, she regarded me for a moment, her face hard to see in the flickering firelight, then took a seat next to me on the cabinet. I found that I was glad she did.  
  
"I was right," I said quietly. "This is my last chance."  
  
"You know, you've mentioned that several times and I still don't know what you mean."  
  
"Actually. neither do I. I just want. to do something right. To mend some of the damage. To be someone that I'm proud of. I just don't know how. And just look what's going to happen tomorrow. There's nothing fair about it, nothing just, nothing good. And there's not a blessed thing I can do about it."  
  
Janeway smiled and looked out the window, her eyes searching until they rested on the stars.  
  
"Back on Earth many, many years ago, there were two countries that fought each other for a hundred years. Countless people died and still neither side was willing to stand down. England wouldn't give up its sights on France, France refused to let itself be occupied. It went on with no end in sight. And then a girl like you, a peasant named Joan found her way to the king of France and convinced him to let her lead an army against the English in a battle at the city of Orleans. She herself kept fighting in that battle even after she was wounded."  
  
"What happened?"  
"She led France's armies to some important victories, drove the English back. The war ended largely because of her."  
  
"That's beautiful," I said, then frowned. "What happened to Joan?"  
  
The way that Janeway's gaze floated down to the snow hinted somehow that she'd been hoping to omit that part of the story.  
  
"She was captured and killed publicly not long before the war ended. Five hundred years later, she was made a saint."  
  
"Now that's not fair. It sounds like if anybody should've seen the end of that war, it was her."  
  
"The point is that Joan of Arc was someone who had to earn everything she had: Respect, honor, everyone who believed in her. There were a lot of reasons for her not to succeed, but she did because she believed in herself."  
  
I looked at her sadly.  
  
"I'm not her," I said, genuinely sorry for the fact. "I wish I were. I wish. I wish I were like you."  
  
"Me?" Janeway said, amazed. "Melai, I'm lost in the Delta quadrant with 150 people as my responsibility. We face death at every corner, we may never see our home again, and you're envious of me?"  
  
"You have a gift," I broke in. "You're special, like Joan. I knew it the first time I saw you. And just to see the way your people look at you, I can see your courage and compassion and grace. You are so. good. I'd give anything to have what you have, Janeway. Anything."  
  
Janeway finally looked at me again. When she did, she reached a hand and set it on the back of my neck.  
  
"You are something, Melai of the Krischta family. I wish that you could see yourself the way I do. You are the kind of person who's willing to try for something more. Because of people like you, worlds change. I've seen it."  
  
"Boy, what you don't know about Rycose IV is a lot."  
  
Janeway smiled, shaking her head.  
  
"And what you don't know about possibilities is a lot."  
  
I smiled back.  
  
"Gods, I hope you're right."  
  
Janeway laughed and hugged an arm around my shoulders. I sat with her like that through the rest of the night, content for the moment in the presence of a friend, and finding incredibly that I almost believed her. Almost.  
  
Dawn came too soon, as we all knew it would. Everyone was awake by then, those who'd been able to sleep only having accomplished a restless few hours. The mood in the hovel was tense and silent, everyone just waiting to hear the first cavalry scuzzlebat's steps in the snow. As we waited, all eyes rested on Janeway, strong steady Janeway who stood straight before the window, staring indifferently out over the snow.  
  
Abruptly, she turned and addressed the group.  
  
"I can't ask any of you to participate in this. It doesn't have to be your fight. I know that all of you have more at stake than we do. You're the ones who call this place your home. If anyone's having any doubts, now's the time to say it."  
  
Janeway scanned every Rycosian face, her eyes slightly lingering on mine. Gods, the woman had guts. That's when I was startled to find that everyone's look had shifted to me, so I'd better say something.  
  
"That's just it, isn't it?" I said slowly. "This is my fight if it's anybody's. I cannot take your place in the bashahm, but I can make Shura know that I'm part of it."  
  
"Our fight," Slam backed me. "It should've been ours rotations ago. If Shura's still standing by the time the day is over, he'll swear that there were ten thousand of us instead of ten."  
  
Janeway sighed in defeat, then went on.  
  
"Whatever happens today, we'll be in it together."  
  
"Captain."  
  
Janeway went to the window before which Tuvok was still standing. The slight change in her otherwise set expression told me the moment she saw what he had seen. The rest of us crowded around, standing on our toes to see over each other's heads.  
  
The horizon was nothing but the shadows of body-to-body soldiers. Wave after wave of them appeared and advanced toward us across the plain.  
  
"Son of a bitch," Chakotay swore.  
  
"B'Elanna, how's your secret weapon?"  
  
"All set, Captain," Torres said and passed Janeway the strangely shaped silver pin that she'd been fiddling with all night. "I just wish I'd been able to test it."  
  
"That's all right, you've done well. What about the beacon to Voyager?"  
  
"Up and running. It's just a matter of time before they pick it up."  
  
"Time. That's something we're lacking at the moment."  
  
"I'll hold out, Chakotay," Janeway said. "Whatever it takes."  
  
"Janeway of Voyager," Shura's voice resonated in the air. "The bashahm starts now."  
  
The Earther's jaw muscles bunched as she ground her teeth in anger and determination. Slowly, she crossed to the door and slid outside with the rest of us filing quietly out behind her. All 13 of us, even little Tieghy stood there before what we found to be an entire Madditan legion standing in its ranks not 150 paces from my door. And just before the center of the front line, perched on the back of an impossibly grand scuzzlebat, Shura.  
  
"Face me here, off-worlder!" he called.  
  
At the last echo of his voice, I heard a sound of many distant footsteps in the snow. Suddenly, rows and rows of peasants occupied both edges of my peripheral vision, lined up as though on either side of a street on a parade route, though I saw not one unheavy face among them.  
  
Well, wasn't that Shura to a T? He'd brought them all there to further break their spirits. After all, what good was a power show with only a handful of brainwashed lackeys to see it? From then on, the point would be made: No one challenged the Builder Shura. No one, no matter what part of the universe they were from. Any who did would die an ugly death, just like this.  
  
Amazingly though, Janeway was unfazed. She held up a hand to signal her group of backers to stay where we were and boldly walked a dangerous distance toward the center of the giant humanoid square.  
  
"I ask that this end before it begins. I will not be subdued without a fight, but I want nothing less than to see people hurt here today. Let it be known that my people came with cooperative intentions and then were lured in and ambushed by authorities. Melai of the Krischta family, the one the same authorities have labeled a coward, had the courage to help us because she listened to her hearts. You can do the same thing. It doesn't have to be this way."  
  
"Enough! Your off-worlder tactics will not save you in the Republic of Madditah!" Shura screeched like a war cry.  
  
Apparently, Commander Chakotay felt as I did: Damned if we were going to let Janeway be thrown to the razorbeasts. Both of us jogged to catch up with Janeway. By her side, I gave in to temptation and took the floor.  
  
"Look at yourselves! Don't you see what's happening? There's nothing to be gained from this, no challenge, no honor. It's murder, just like it's always been! We spend our lives killing, watching our friends die alongside people who never wronged us, but we still call our enemies. Why? Because it's all we know? Because we're afraid of the Builders? That shouldn't be! Look around you, everyone! We have everything we need. If we don't stop these wars, they will go on until even that is gone. All of you, in your hearts know I'm right. Stand here with me now. This could be your last chance."  
  
The way the tirade poured out of me startled me even more than it did everyone else. Nothing happened at first. Then, in the corner of my eye, there was halting movement. Looking over my shoulder, I found someone no more that a boy edging his way toward our group as though trying not to be noticed.  
  
Someone noticed.  
  
A bent old woman followed the boy. A middle-aged couple followed her, and then a young family. Slowly, one by one, they trickled over. Soon the trickle became a stream, and the stream a river. By the end, nearly half the peasants had settled in behind us.  
  
Janeway watched with an awed smile. To me it was a damn miracle. Shura on the other hand was turning a dangerously bright red as his fury threatened to overtake him.  
  
"How dare you!? I am the Builder Shura! You are not worthy of knowing the light of the Gods, none of you are! You will all die in darkness!"  
  
"That's not going to work, Shura. You don't hold these people in fear. Not any more."  
  
To my surprise, my retort was followed by a cheer from the crowd behind me. After watching Shura shrink several cm's, Janeway and I exchanged a knowing glance. We had him. If he went through the bashahm, he faced the first fair fight of his life. If not, everyone would see what a fraud he was. I'll admit that part of me wanted him to go through with it, to see him humiliated and suffering. But that part was not as big as the one that couldn't help feeling sorry for him, and just wanted it all to end.  
  
"Stand down, Shura. Don't be a fool, it's not worth these people's lives."  
  
"Demon," Shura growled back at Janeway. "You are weak. And a few farmers are not going to save you! Form your lines!"  
  
Slowly, reluctantly, the soldiers shifted their ranks into two long, parallel lines some four paces apart: A gauntlet for Janeway to run. Janeway turned and spoke to her people.  
  
"Show time. B'Elanna, are you ready?"  
  
"It's as good as I can make it, Captain."  
  
The line of Janeway's mouth slanted. "Then it's as good as it gets. Melai, if you'd direct everyone to their place?"  
  
I nodded blankly and arranged the Fed's and peasants into the same pattern as the soldiers. Even with the peasants, our lines were painfully shorter. Janeway and Shura took their places at the ends of their respective ordeals. To her credit, Janeway was looking remarkably composed despite her unsteady condition. Shura on the other hand was as pale as the snow and his baldhead glistened with sweat.  
  
"Perhaps I'll see you on the other side," Janeway told him.  
  
"You'll die in five paces, Earther," Shura growled back.  
  
The referee who stood near me at the end of the gauntlets fired a small handgun into the air and the bashahm began.  
  
"B'Elanna, now!" Chakotay called.  
  
As Janeway ran to meet the gauntlet's beginning, she and Torres simultaneously slapped the silver pins they wore on their jackets. That's when Janeway began to sparkle with a bright blue light. Before my eyes, her image became transparent, and then disappeared. The poor fools at the beginning of the line had only air to swing at. Just as quickly, Janeway shimmered back into existence a comfortable distance from the end of her would-be ordeal, leaving every Rycosian present to blink at the phenomenon.  
  
Meanwhile, Shura made a mad dash down our lines in an attempt to plow through. It worked for a bit, but the first half managed to slow him down enough for the rest of us to get some good whacks on him. By the time he collapsed facedown out of the end of the gauntlet, he was bleeding from the nose, lips, and eye socket, had a shoulder dropped into an unnatural position, and numerous black and blue marks covering the exposed parts of his skin. When he lifted his face to spit out some blood and snow, he saw Janeway towering over him unscathed.  
  
"You." he said, full of venom.  
  
"It's called a site-to-site transport. You might know about it if you put some effort into something other than killing."  
  
"Bad form!" Shura screamed as he tripped up to his wobbly legs. "You can't just -!"  
  
"You know the rules, Builder Shura. She made it from one end of your lines to the other. The ancient texts say nothing about how to do it," I reminded him.  
  
Shura broke in with a viscous war cry. Without another word, he launched himself at Janeway and caught her around the body, bowling her to the ground. Janeway landed in the snow with a thud as the wind was forced from her lungs. Shura moved to crush her chest with a stomp of his foot. Janeway rolled out of the way and straight up to her feet. There they both assumed semi-crouched defensive positions and slowly circled each other as everyone trickled into a large, crowded ring around them.  
  
"Stay back! Any who interfere will be shot!" the referee yelled.  
  
Shura attempted a series of twitch-fakes. Janeway's iron concentration remained untouched, save for the slightest reflexive counter movements. Shura's lip curled back into the ugliest smile I've ever seen. Janeway grimaced slightly, but remained composed. Through it all, the crowd was silent, each and every one of us praying to the Gods and our ancestors that Janeway would be the one left standing in the end.  
  
Shura ran at her again. In one smooth, graceful move, Janeway pivoted out of the way while simultaneously sending him into the ground with a little push to back up his own momentum. Shura rolled easily to his feet and went for Janeway again. Again she fed him to the snow. The sequence repeated itself three more times. By then, I was beginning to wonder just how long the tedium would continue before Shura got it into his head that a bonsai charge was not going to work. On his third trip to the ground, he lost his balance and landed sprawled on his back. Janeway was on him instantly, delivering a fierce kick to the side of his head. Shura recovered from the shock too quickly and was back up on his feet in a flash. At an impasse, they circled each other again.  
  
"Kill him, Earther! Wallop him!" someone yelled.  
  
An enthusiastic cheer erupted. In a rage, Shura swung at Janeway wildly. She ducked, dodged, and countered, landing a hard hook to his belly. He coughed at the impact and staggered back in a doubled-over position. He abruptly unfurled and swung aimless punches at Janeway. That's when the terrible thing happened, and by sheer accident too.  
  
Shura's viscous fist slammed directly into the site of Janeway's wound.  
  
Janeway gasped and fell to her knees, then onto her side. She curled around the wound, petrified by the pain, grinding her teeth and squeezing her eyes shut. Shura squinted down at her, towering on his unsteady feet, and that hideous grin of his appeared again. He ran to Janeway and delivered a kick to the same place. This drew a deep roar from her and sent her rolling to her other side. I was horrified to see a deep red stain left in the snow where Janeway had just been. Shura dove on top of her and ensnared her throat in his hands, squeezing with all his might.  
  
"No!" different people screamed at various intervals.  
  
Janeway coughed and struggled to breathe past the two clamps on her throat as she lay pinned on her back, her face quickly turning a dangerous shade of red. In trying to pull Shura's hands away, she managed to turn her face toward the cluster of Feds and myself. She opened her eyes and saw us, saw that her comrades hurt to see her hurt, as she could not breathe, neither could they. In that instant, she knew that they bore any equivalent of what she did, as did I. She knew, and she wouldn't have it.  
  
Janeway's hands flew from Shura's wrists to his fingers. She wormed her index fingers under Shura's pinkies. With all her strength, she peeled those fingers back until the fantastic crack that must've flooded the entire valley, second only to Shura's scream.  
  
Shura reflexively fell back from the shock, gaping at his misshapen and crippled hands. Janeway seized the opportunity to roll to her own feet. She regained her balance before Shura did, and flew at him with a series of ferocious blows to his head and belly, emitting a loud roar with each. Though I don't believe Janeway was concerned with methods at the time, her actions proved to be quite efficient. By the end, a bloodied Shura was down on his knees, his head at just the right level to receive the maximum force of Janeway's kick. His head flew backwards, taking his body with it, and he was flat on his back. Janeway staggered towards him, gathering momentum for her pounce.  
  
"No!" Shura squealed frantically. "No, don't! I yield! I yield!"  
  
Janeway stopped dead in her tracks. Frozen mid-stride, she stared fiercely down at him, her shoulders heaving with her fast, deep breath. And her eyes. My Gods, her eyes were primal, wide and wild and unblinking even as the sweat dripped into them.  
  
"I said I yield!" Shura begged.  
  
Chakotay quietly slid between the people in his way and went to stand behind Janeway.  
  
"Captain."  
  
At the sound of his steady voice, Janeway's eyes broke from Shura's. She turned slowly around and looked up into the face of her first officer.  
  
"You won. He's beaten. It's over."  
  
Janeway's brow furrowed and her eyes drifted downwards.  
  
"That's. fffortunate."  
  
Janeway's legs gave way and she collapsed into Chakotay.  
  
"Wildman, Tuvok, quickly! She's hemorrhaging!" Chakotay yelled as he eased her deftly to the ground.  
  
Half the crowd erupted into cheers over Janeway's triumph, while the rest crossed their hearts in worried silence. I myself suddenly felt a wave of fatigue as the adrenaline that had kept my senses in overdrive for the past several days rapidly dissipated. My legs disappeared under me and I fell to my knees. It was over. It was really over. Shura would never hold us in terror again. Of course, he would be succeeded by one of the Builders, but the damage was done to their entire reign. All of these people, the peasants, the soldiers and what they'd seen. What they knew would spread like wildfire. The people could grow bold; the soldiers could grow brains!  
  
"Melai, he's got a gun!" Tieghy's thin little voice trumpeted above all other noise.  
  
My head snapped up and I saw Shura on his feet, his face the color of blood, his eyes as round as the full moons, his teeth bared, and a pistol in his mangled hand. The weapon, which he must've had hidden his clothing the entire time, was trained carefully on where Janeway lay in the snow amidst the huddle of her crew.  
  
The most inspiring thing happened then: I stopped thinking. It's really quite amazing how fast and how much you can do when you're unburdened with thought. While I don't recommend it most of the time, I will say that acting without thinking can be quite appropriate. Over the next few moments, I moved through a fog of non-thought, motivated only by the inferno that burned in my hearts and pulsed through my body when I looked at Shura. I let out the most beast-like cry that I ever could have imagined coming from a person. I launched myself from where I knelt and ran with all my might at Shura.  
  
The Builder fired.  
  
Being shot between the hearts is, for lack of a better word, dazzling, not to mention another new experience. After the initial sledge hammer-like impact on my chest, there was no pain at all. There was only a kind of warm numbness that immediately cascaded over me, protecting me, even when the impact of the blast threw me into the ground. I lay there, vaguely acknowledging the hundreds of enraged cries rising around me. Tuvok, Torres, and Slam were suddenly around me. When Slam raised my head to rest in his lap, I caught a glimpse of my chest: An area just to the left of my sternum bore an impressive wound, strikingly similar to the one that killed Lexei. It was surreal, almost as though I were watching the finale of some hokey B-play unfold.  
  
"Melai, can you hear me?" Tuvok demanded urgently.  
  
The image of my friend suddenly filled my mind. I couldn't see her, could barely look around.  
  
". Janeway?"  
  
"She was not struck. You, however, obviously were."  
  
". Please," I whispered, remembering the situation, "h-help me stand."  
  
"You must be still. Focus on the sound of my voice. It is vital that you stay conscious."  
  
I shook my trembling head and swallowed the bitter tang of the blood rising in my throat.  
  
". You don't understand. please. no time."  
  
Images around me were rapidly blurring, but I held on long enough to see the Feds exchange a grim glance just before the two of them and Slam ever so deftly hauled me to my feet. Even then, they supported most of my weight. Shura still stood some ten paces before me, but his face had dropped from wild to completely slack. His hand limply held the pistol, barely tight enough to keep it from dropping.  
  
Impossible. This couldn't be the man who'd held the world in such horror, who'd willed the death of so many. Not this deflated, quivering mudfish I saw before me!  
  
"Say what you have to say," Torres told me.  
  
I swallowed and gathered my strength.  
  
"You. will never h-hurt. another soul. Not these people. or the off- worlders. the Palaish, the Unions. or me. You are dead to me."  
  
Shura's eyes suddenly came to life and seared into me.  
  
"I am the Builder Shura! The Builder Shura never dies!"  
  
Almost all within the same instant, Shura launched himself at me, an energy shot from some still-anonymous person lit the area at his back, he froze, and he fell.  
  
My own legs failed me and the Feds lowered me to the ground.  
  
"Melai? Melai!" I heard Slam's frantic voice.  
  
"Melai, hold on. I'm getting a signal from Voyager."  
  
". must remain conscious a few minutes more."  
  
". come on, stay with us."  
  
The voices of Slam and the Feds began to melt together with the brew- ha-ha around us, and my vision steadily dimmed. Over the following few minutes, while my companions struggled to keep me focused above the din of the hysterical crowd, I remember being vaguely aware of the fact that I was dying. All I could feel was one of my hearts hammering away at my chest and skull, as well as an almost overwhelming sort of giddy sensation. I know it sounds sick, but the blood rapidly escaping my chest despite the pressure of Tuvok's hand seized me with an urge to laugh. Not just because I was dying, but because I was dying and in some strange way, the most important way, I was all right.  
  
Soon, even that awareness faded. The sounds faded. The faces faded. I faded.  
  
I laughed.  
  
Since it's obvious that I didn't die, I won't insult your intelligence with melodrama. What I remember about the period between the moment I lost consciousness and the one soon to be discussed is mixed and vague. First there was a blue shimmering light that enveloped me in an intense sort of cool tingling. After that, there were voices, lots of voices. They were frantic at first, then I lost them. Next they were calm and brisk, than I lost them again. Each time I found the voices, I tried to hold onto them. I had to know how everything had turned out. But I knew that they would just grow quieter until I lost them again. It was utterly frustrating.  
  
Finally, a different kind of awareness returned. I knew because that time, a transparent image of Lexei wasn't hovering before me, telling me that life was just a bowl of cherries, whatever those are. In fact, the place I found myself in was almost silent and completely dark. The only sound was the waltzing rhythm of my hearts. and. and the slow breaths of a presence, steady beside me.  
  
Steady, Melai, I told myself. That's not necessarily a bad thing.  
  
It was after running a quick inventory of my body that I deduced three things: I was not going to go unconscious again within the next thirty seconds as had been the theme so far, I was positioned comfortably on a soft horizontal surface, and the reason the room was dark was because my eyes were closed.  
  
I drew up my eyelids slowly and was greeted by the image of an intensely fuzzy blur. After I willed myself to blink a few times, the blur focused into the face of Kathryn Janeway. A slow, wide grin appeared on her weary face.  
  
"Doctor! She's coming around," she called over her shoulder.  
  
I tried to speak and my words came out in a parched whisper. Janeway noticed and leaned over me, positioning her ear close to my mouth.  
  
"Are you all right?" I repeated.  
  
Janeway shot me a look of amazement.  
  
"I'm fine!" she said. "I'm fine."  
  
That's when the human-looking man with the exquisitely bald head appeared at my side out of nowhere. He waved a wand over me and made some noises as he looked at an odd contraption in his other hand. All the while, Janeway looked at him anxiously. He snapped his equipment shut with a triumphant smile.  
  
"Congratulations, Ms. Krischta. You appear to have successfully cheated death."  
  
Wow. Good for me.  
  
The Doctor continued with some other puttering. I summoned my strength to prod Janeway for more.  
  
"Others?"  
  
"All here, including Slam and your Palaish friends."  
  
"Oh, good. Where's here?"  
  
"We're on Voyager. This is our sickbay."  
  
Another new experience.  
  
"Oh. my."  
  
"Voyager beamed us out just as you lost consciousness. It's been about 36 hours for both of us."  
  
"Shura?"  
  
"Dead."  
  
"And you, Captain, are still recovering from a nasty case of hemmoragenic/septic shock. Now back to bed, your little friend is in perfectly good hands."  
  
Janeway glared at the Doctor.  
  
"Say 'good night', Captain," he said a final tone.  
  
Janeway twisted her mouth in defeat, then turned back to me, her hand on my forehead, smoothing back my stray bangs.  
  
"Orders are orders. Sleep, Melai. You've done well."  
  
The next morning, Slam was the first face I saw. Together we watched from my bed as Janeway slept on the other side of the room. For the following 24 hours, the Doctor refused to let either of us leave, despite my reassurances, as well as Janeway's once she woke up, that we really were feeling better. He remained firm that we both had to stay the day at least. Luckily, we had visitors to break the monotony. Slam was my shadow for the day, as well as the Palaish who came at intervals of about four hours. They really were good kids, telling excitedly of the things that they found on their travels through the wondrous ship and making sure that I had everything I needed. Chakotay, Torres, and even Tuvok came to see the captain, and bestow their polite regards on me. I watched with happiness the show of unspoken tenderness between them, there in their eyes, their tones, and their genuine concern.  
  
On the third morning, I woke up to Janeway smiling down at me, and found the strength to sit up.  
  
"How are you feeling?" Janeway asked.  
  
I tugged the collar of the blue pajamas I was wearing forward and peered down at my chest. Where there should have been a grim wound barely on the way to healing, there was a pink scar only slightly bigger than a 2- credit coin.  
  
"Incredible!"  
  
Janeway grinned and offered me her hand.  
  
"Come on. There's something I want you to see."  
  
I took the offered hand and followed Janeway out of the room, into a gray carpeted hallway on my wobbly legs. Not five steps into our journey, we ran into Ensign Wildman. Next to her was a small yellow-haired girl.  
  
"Good morning, Captain. May we have a moment?"  
  
"Of coarse."  
  
"Melai, this is my daughter Naomi. She has something for you."  
  
Wildman smiled adoringly down at the girl who took a step forward and looked up at me.  
  
"Thanks for helping save my mom."  
  
With that, she held out a ruffled white flower in her little hand. I melted at the gesture. Her glowing face was such a sight.  
  
"Thank you," I said, accepting her gift. "It's beautiful."  
  
"It's a carnation. I grew it myself in the hydroponics bay."  
  
"I'm sure you did. It's almost as pretty as you."  
  
Naomi beamed and took of skipping. Janeway and Wildman exchanged a knowing glance.  
  
"Go on Ensign, before she finds her way to the bridge."  
  
"I'm glad you're both feeling better," Wildman called as she began chasing her daughter.  
  
Janeway and I chuckled and started walking again.  
  
"Now, that's the way it should be," I thought out loud.  
  
"What is?"  
  
"An innocent little girl surrounded by people who love her. Everyone should have that."  
  
Janeway's face turned serious.  
  
"Melai, there's no reason why you can't have that too."  
  
"How do you mean?"  
  
"I'm offering you asylum."  
  
My jaw dropped and I stopped dead in my tracks until Janeway pulled me along.  
  
"Wait a minute, my head is spinning!" I said, still in tow.  
  
"Relax. Just consider the facts for a moment: Your home is no longer safe for you. You can find a new one on Voyager, become part of our family. But we are heading to the Alpha quadrant. We won't be seeing Rycose IV again."  
  
"Gods, I. I don't know what to say!"  
  
"Don't say anything just yet."  
  
As we continued to walk, I was suddenly bombarded with pros and cons. Asylum on a starship of all places! And then to be with people who cared about me, away from the killing and carnage. It was a forgotten dream come true, and all I had to do was say yes.  
  
So why was I so unsure?  
  
We rounded a corner and slid into a room full of tables and chairs as well as a sort of kitchenette in the corner. I was then faced with the biggest window I've ever seen, splashed across the length of the wall. What was beyond the window made me freeze, suddenly unable to breathe.  
  
There, all at once, was a glowing sphere hovering in a starry night sky, like one of the globes they had dangling from the ceiling in my geography classroom at the academy. The great seas, the northern mountains, the middle deserts. Places I knew, places I thought I'd never see. All lay before me at same time.  
  
"Is that.?" I gasped.  
  
"Rycose IV," Janeway confirmed.  
  
". It's so. um. It's so small!"  
  
"We're very far from the atmosphere."  
  
"But." I walked closer to the window, entranced. "People fight over this? They kill over this? Borders that don't exist!"  
  
"What did you think it would look like?"  
  
"I don't know, I. Like a map, I suppose. I thought I could see where Madditah ends and Paland begins. Solid lines, barriers, at least different colors. It's just not there!"  
  
Janeway came next to me and I felt her furrowed eyes on my wide ones.  
  
"Is that so bad?"  
  
"Yes! Don't you see? It's all us!"  
  
"'Us'?"  
  
"We think we kill and die for destiny, a destiny defined by the Gods as they made the world and all of its contours. Without those borders to tell one from the other, there is no destiny, not the way they think. People are dying over a shadow!"  
  
Janeway emitted a sigh.  
  
"So who's going to tell them?"  
  
Finally, I was able to look away from the window. My eyes fell to the floor, found Janeway's black boots, drifted up her solidly planted body, and rested on her wonderful, thoughtful face.  
  
"I am," I heard myself whisper. "I have to go back, don't I?"  
  
Janeway said nothing, but smiled fondly at me and set a hand on the back of my neck, willing strength into me with her touch.  
  
EPILOGUE  
  
I turned and watched my band of nearly a hundred farmers, laborers, and ex-soldiers as they worked busily to erect a series of long cabins in the same vicinity as my house, a sort of village. They sawed and hammered and worked together --Palaish, Madditans, people from their different walks of life. It was nothing less than a miracle.  
The situation before us was grim, but oddly hopeful. Gathered there in the outskirts, we had a community of people who had come from far and wide to contribute to a new cause. Our mission as Janeway had helped me design was to spread awareness of the lies behind the strife in the world as widely as we could, while promoting cooperation and trust in every way possible, as well as providing sanctuary to those in need. And who had fallen into the role of the leader of this revolution against the status quo?  
  
"Melai, my lady! Is this to your satisfaction?" called one of the workers.  
  
I half-smiled and examined her work.  
  
Since the enthusiastic mass swearing of allegiance to Yours Truly, I'd been 'My Lady'. Try getting used to that.  
  
Janeway and her team broke off from their meeting with Slam who, by the way, was working as a sort of foreman on the project.  
  
"You're all set," Torres announced. "If everyone does their part, you'll have a neighborhood by the end of the week."  
  
"Thank you," I said, looking to each one of them. "All of you. I'm. really going to mess you."  
  
There was a pause, broken by Janeway.  
  
"You all go ahead. I'll be along shortly."  
  
Everyone nodded their understanding and then each came forward to bid me farewell in their own way: First Wildman who sincerely wished me the best, then Tuvok who held up a hand in a convoluted gesture and told me to live long and prosper. Torres grinned at me and said, "You'll be fine," as if sensing my apprehension. Chakotay was silent, but shook my hand, his gratitude obvious in his eyes.  
  
"Transporter room. Four to beam up."  
  
At Chakotay's command, they shimmered away. Only Janeway remained, her kind, genuine eyes on my face.  
  
"Are you sure?" she said.  
  
I took a breath.  
  
"No. but I have to try."  
  
Janeway looked at me the way my academy instructors used to when I did something right. From her though, it meant so much more.  
  
"You know, now that I think of it, I don't think I ever actually thanked you for -"  
  
"Don't," I interrupted. "Please don't. None of this would've gotten started without you. I would've died one way or the other, without doing a blessed thing. I never would've found the courage. And now, look at what we have. I owe you everything. You owe me nothing."  
  
Janeway stared at me quietly. Finally, she lifted a hand to her collar. After removing the four pips, she took my hand, dropped them in my palm, gently pushed my fingers closed, and held my hand between both of hers.  
  
"Melai of the Krischta family, you saved my life."  
  
My throat tightened and I seized her in an embrace, which she returned just as forcefully.  
  
"I have waited my entire life to hear that put to my name," I whispered in her ear. "I hope that you find your way. I'll never for get you."  
  
"And I'll hold you in my heart. You deserve so much to see your dream come true."  
  
We held on for another moment, then slowly released each other. Janeway took a step back and, never taking her eyes from mine, tapped her badge.  
  
"Janeway to Voyager. One to beam up."  
  
I watched the blue light shimmer her away, the woman who had changed my life and I would never see again. But somehow, I knew she'd always be with me.  
  
With a sigh, I straightened up and fastened the four little pins to my collar.  
  
"Slam," I called in my most authoritative voice. "Where are you? We need to assign teams for food gathering."  
  
Today, two rotations after I met Captain Kathryn Janeway of the starship Voyager, we have built a community known far and wide as "neutral territory", which is a start. Our numbers are now in the thousands, include people from all alliances, and grow every day. It hasn't always been easy. Sometimes differences of nationality still manage to cause differences of opinion among us. We've had to defend ourselves from governmental raids more than once. Such episodes have resulted another near-death for me, the loss of Slam's right eye, and the loss of Bergory all together. Bergory died bravely defending a small family last spring, and since then, we have shouted her name whenever battle calls.  
  
Still, with all the grief and frustration, I can say with both my hearts that what we have here is something wonderful. I believe in these people, I believe in what we're doing. I believe that we can make the greatest difference the world has seen in generations, with the lives we've saved and the things we've built. I believe that the children who play in these new streets will grow up and make it even better. I believe that we can reach the stars.  
  
I believe.  
  
Speed of the Gods to you, Captain Janeway, wherever you may be.  
  
THE END  
  
There you have it. Did you like it? Please? 


End file.
